Introduction
Fantastic Fest has become one of the most renowned genre film festivals in the exhibition game. Even with scaled-back scheduling due to the pandemic, Fantastic Fest’s 2021 is packed with its usual carefully curated selection of horror, fantasy, sci-fi, and other offbeat movies from around the world. Among the top-notch list of entries this year is the feel-good fantasy/adventure Iké Boys.
Director Eric McEver makes his feature debut with Iké Boys, a coming-of-age by way of a tokusatsu-style kaiju/mecha battle saga. Yes, you read that right. McEver co-wrote the love letter to Japanese pop culture and Oklahoma with fellow scribe Jeff Hammer.
Premise
Set in 1999, Iké Boys follows high school student Shawn (Quinn Lord) and his best friend Vik (Ronak Gandhi) as they survive the boredom of adolescence in Oklahoma by obsessing about all things Japan. When Vik’s family hosts a Japanese exchange student Miki (Christina Hija) for Christmas break, they are excited to show off their mail-order copy of a hard-to-find anime Shawn just received. Instead of wowing her with their pop-culture prowess, however, the movie instead engages a prophecy that wreaks havoc on the boys’ friendship and the world.
Iké Boys is a heartwarming and often hilarious effort. Despite a smaller budget, McEver has packed the film with beautifully blended digital effects as well as top-notch creature/costume design. The use of animated sequences helps bolster action scenes, adding even more creative flair to the fanciful story. A subtle correlation between Japanese and Native American mysticism also incorporates a thoughtful and unique component.
McEver sat down with Cinema Scholars’ Rebecca Elliott at Fantastic Fest 2021 to discuss his semi-biographical ode to cultural obsession, Oklahoma connections, and squeezing a visual effects-heavy fantasy out of a small-scale budget.
Interview
Elliott:
Hi, Eric.
McEver:
Hello Rebecca.
Elliott:
It’s nice to talk to you today. Thanks for taking time.
McEver:
I think that’s my line. Thank you for making time for me.
Elliott:
Well, as a fellow Okie, I was super excited to check out this movie and have the opportunity to talk to you about it.
McEver:
Okay. Yeah.
Elliott:
Well, according to my research, it looks like you are originally from Oklahoma. So how much of the film is biographical?
McEver:
A great deal of it. I mean, the lead character, Shawn, is mostly based off of me. The character of Vik is loosely inspired by my best friend. Miki is an amalgam of various close Japanese female friends that I’ve met since going to Tokyo. And then there’s just a lot of little things in there. I mean the character of Shawn’s father, he’s kind of a mixture of several childhood friends. And there’s a lot of little subtle things in there, like the school that we shot, that’s the school I grew up at.
Elliott:
Was that Casady?
McEver:
Yeah, yeah. And like the stone playground where they’re testing out their powers and they have their fight, that’s where I skinned my knee for the time in kindergarten.
Elliott:
Nice!
McEver:
And a lot of it, part of it is, it’s a first feature. It’s who is going to help you out, who are going to be your allies, where is their goodwill? The bigger thing for me honestly, is I wanted to do something that was genuine. That would really… they say specificity is universal. And I wanted to make something with universal reach. And I thought that, well, the way to do that is to basically make myself vulnerable. I mean, just be really honest about the things that I feel and my own lived experience. And then I might have a chance of reaching other people.
Elliott:
Absolutely. Write what you know, right?
McEver:
And embellish it a bit.
Elliott:
Embellish it just a bit. (laughing) I’m curious why you set Iké Boys in 1999?
McEver:
So it’s not quite when I was in high school, but the nineties were when I had many formative memories. And what it really comes down to is, for many years people were convinced that something big and something bad was going to happen at the turn of the millennium.
Elliott:
Right, right. Y2K!
McEver:
And so that right in and of itself, that sort of changing of the eras, that is a wonderful metaphor for growing up and for change and for things happening. And part of the appeal was the countdown to 2000. That was both a cultural fixation in the States, but also in Japan where, interestingly enough, people were really obsessed with the prophecies of Nostradamus.
And so there was a bi-cultural connection there…I think the bigger, maybe the bigger thing for me is we’re living in a pretty dark apocalyptic time now. And I guess there’s never really been a moment in history where people haven’t thought they were living in the end times. And in a fun, sweet, colorful, unique package, I wanted to just kind of gently suggest to people that, well, maybe we have the skills and the abilities within our grasp to get through this dark time too.
Elliott:
Yeah. I love that.
McEver:
We got through this one before. So all of those things funneled together, they led to 1999.
Elliott:
Well, that happened to be the year that I graduated from OU and moved to Austin.
McEver:
Oh, no kidding?
Elliott:
Yep. So, of course it resonated with me personally.
McEver:
Oh yeah.
Elliott:
Japanese pop-culture plays a huge role in the story. Can you talk about the animation sequences and how those are created? And how you chose where to feature them within the story?
McEver:
Yeah. Well, I mean, I love animation. Animation is everything I love about directing turned up to 11. Because everything, everything is a creative decision. And there’s a freedom in that you can do anything. But it’s a real opportunity because there’s just, there’s so many micro-decisions you can make that contribute to the overall whole.
So the animators were scattered all over the world. But the two animation directors, one’s in France and one’s in Taiwan. So both of them had, at various points, trained under, or certainly been been influenced by, Japanese animators, including some pretty legendary figures from Ghibli. The goal of this is I wanted to create animation that felt like, animation from 30 years ago that felt like it would’ve been ahead of its time then.
So we were really tapping into a eighties, nineties, animation aesthetic. And it was a deliberate choice in my part to get non-Japanese animators to do a Japanese style animation because they are passionate about it, but they bring their own fresh spark and inspiration. So no matter how hard we tried to make it look Japanese, it was going to inevitably look slightly different, and that was a good thing. That means it would be in the spirit, but there would just be little things that were fresh and new.
And as I interspersed it through the story, I mean, really, it came down to showing that this film was prophesying everything that the kids would be doing. And as their transformations progress, the animation and the use of animation intensifies, because gradually the realities are blurring and everything in the film is coming true.
Elliott:
So you chose animation to literally illustrate the fight scenes or action scenes. But also you have a lot of effects in this thing. I mean, and there’s a mix of digital, but then also you incorporate like the cool costuming, suite, and everything, with the Mecha and Kaiju battle narrative. I imagine it wasn’t the biggest budget and you pulled it off really well. Can you just talk about merging of the different visual effects, along with the costuming and stuff that you worked with?
McEver:
Well, thank you. It was not easy. And the interesting thing about it is, I think, the use of the practical effects, the suits, the tonkotatsu Japanese style finale. I think that and the animation is the stuff that’s going to draw the most attention because it’s quote unquote, old school. But there’s a lot of CG in the film. There’s 525 shots in total that have some form of a digital effect on them.
Elliott:
Whoa!
McEver:
And, honestly, what it came down to was it would’ve taken a long time anyways. The pandemic was a real blessing in disguise because we shot right before the shit the fan. And then, it was, I don’t want to say anything about the pandemic was a blessing, but it did provide an opportunity to take the time we needed to get everything right.
Elliott:
Yeah. Silver lining.
McEver:
Because we didn’t have unlimited resources, we didn’t have unlimited money, but we did have time. And it’s really interesting because, words like vision and passion and story, unquestionably, those are the most important. And those have been my driving force. For something like this there’s a equally important but much less sexy word called infrastructure. And our infrastructure was limited but it worked. And a lot of it was just, it’s communicating, and frankly, it was just me having the film tattooed on my brain. So that I could know very specifically how each shot related to each other shot, and what degree of touch up, and what levels of green and what levels of yellow were needed in the moment.
Elliott:
Yeah. And how to intertwine everything tonally and make it all fit.
McEver:
Yeah. Yeah. So honestly it came down to a lot of, I mean, a lot of very hard work from the producers, a lot of very hard work from the effects supervisor. And I’m dancing around the fact that the suits are just amazing.
Elliott:
Yeah, they’re so cool.
McEver:
The Chiodo brothers, there’s a reason why they have decades long reputation as the best puppet makers in town.
Elliott:
So cool! I didn’t realize they were behind the amazing [kaiju and mecha] suits! Now, growing up, did you draw any comparisons between Japanese mysticism and native American mysticism? Or is that something that you’ve come upon later in life?
McEver:
Oh, this one is interesting. Well, there’s a couple ways to answer that question. So, first of all I would say growing up in Oklahoma, I saw all the Japanese things because I sought that out. But I saw the same big, popular things as everyone else. And I remember very specifically being in Oklahoma and surrounded by all of this native American culture and thinking, well, why are the big movies all about European people? Why am I not seeing the King Arthur of this? And so I think, I guess there was an innate curiosity that that sparked. And I guess, I don’t know, this is an ongoing process, but a desire to listen to perspectives other than my own.
Elliott:
Exactly. And learning how it all relates.
McEver:
And that certainly pushed me to Japan. So I will say, I mean, there are so many nuances to this, but life in Japan has really clarified a lot of my own understanding of the world. Because there’s certain… like there’s certain words in Japanese that we don’t and have in English that have helped me understand just how I and how other people- how everyone interacts with the world.
There’s a word called Reikan in Japanese, R-E-I-K-A-N, which means your spiritual sense. And people will just talk casually about it. Like, oh, that’s a well-developed spiritual sense. You’re very attuned with the mystical energies around you. And just being able to literally have a vocabulary for that really, really helped me understand a lot of things about myself and how I interacted with the world that weren’t so present or so easily explained in the Western culture I grew up with.
So to be honest with you, I mean, I think I’m still learning and I’m still trying to listen and I’m still trying to, I’m still trying to have my mind blown and sort of expanded. And just, I’m still trying to get those fresh perspectives.
Elliott:
Right, right. How do you feel about the current crop of mainstream Kaiju/Mecha stuff, like Pacific Rim and, obviously, the Godzilla franchises? How do they sit with someone who is a lifelong fan of this type of storytelling?
McEver:
Well, it’s interesting. It depends on the film, I will tell you that. There’s some where I feel like it’s kind of taking the surface level and there’s an assumed understanding without an actual understanding of what makes it tick. And I will say that some take on a very, sort of like, ironic or goofy tone. And for me, that’s a fundamental misunderstanding. Because I mean, look, like objectively, so much stuff in the Kaiju films is just bug nuts ridiculous.
But one doesn’t watch it ironically. You watch it to invest in a high concept alternate reality, like much as one would go and watch a musical.
Elliott:
Yeah. Or sci-fi fantasies or great adventure stories.
McEver:
Or a classical novel, yeah. So whenever it’s treated sincerely, that’s when I’m like, okay, they get it. And I’m not saying don’t have fun with it. And I’m not saying don’t put humor into it. But I’m saying, when I see it done at arm’s length with sort of like, I don’t know, this veil of self-knowing irony over it, that’s when my hackles go up.
One specific thing. The very newest Godzilla property, it’s Godzilla Singular Point. I have seen it three times. It is an absolute masterpiece. Everyone should see it.
It manages to connect Godzilla and giant monsters with the universe and the meaning of life and the meaning of time. And it’s just the best.
Elliott:
What an incredible endorsement coming from an an expert, I would say. Godzilla Singular Point will be added to my never-ending list! Well, thank you. I think I’m probably about to get cut off here, but I just wanted to throw in a couple quick Oklahoma things I picked up on. Of course you had to have the song Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robot from Oklahoma natives The Flaming Lips in the soundtrack. I mean…
McEver:
Of course, yeah.
Elliott:
And then you got [legendary weather man/Oklahoma hero] Gary England to do a cameo! The Okie inside me was totally nerding out.
McEver:
So two things about Gary England. First of all, Gary in person is everything you would want him to be, a consummate gentlemen, really sweet, and just funny as all heck get out. I would love to put the outtakes in the Blu-ray. He is just a ham and a half.
The other thing I would say, the reason he is in the film besides him being an Oklahoma institution is he is the reason I’m alive today. There was a tornado in my neighborhood when I was 12 and I was watching the news and he alerted me just in time to get into the nearest shelter.
Elliott:
Yes! Because he talked to the kids. He would tell all the kids at home, if you’re at home by yourself, go get in the closet. Different places to take cover.
McEver:
And I did. And if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be alive. So this is very much a thank you to him. And to be honest, I think this connects to a lot of deeper things in that experience. I think that experience gave me a preternatural awareness of my own mortality. And a sense that I had better live in the here and now and do the things I care about and do things that matter and not waste my life away. So…
Elliott:
It all comes back to Gary England (laughing.) He’s an Oklahoma icon! Even Spielberg used archival footage of him in Twister. Although you got Gary in there, there is one missed opportunity- you made a movie set in Oklahoma at Christmas and there was no BC Clark Anniversary Sale (a beloved annual OKC commercial/jingle)!
McEver:
Well, I have to save something for the sequel.
Elliott:
True. Touche, touche. Well, it was such a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much. And I-
McEver:
That’s my line.
Elliott:
Ha! There I go stealing your line again! I wish you so much luck with this awesome movie.
McEver:
Thank you so much.
