Introduction
A Breed Apart is a creature feature serving as a spiritual sequel to 2006’s The Breed, a Wes Craven-presented horror thriller starring Michelle Rodriguez and a smattering of disposable teens dispatched by trained killer dogs. To revisit such a dour situation, filmmaking brothers Griff and Nathan Furst knew a modern approach was needed. That required a more self-aware touch. The result is pure fun. A Breed Apart knows what it is, and viewers with the same awareness are rewarded with a film that isn’t necessarily “good” but certainly enjoyable and surprisingly confident.
A Breed Apart brings together Grace Caroline Currey (Shazam: Fury of the Gods), Virginia Gardner (Fall), Page Kennedy (The Meg), Troy Gentile (The Goldbergs), Riele Downs (Henry Danger), and Hayden Panettiere (Heroes) as influencers facing off against an island teeming with rabid dogs.
If that sounds silly, don’t worry – everyone working on the film knows that, too. The characters are all rendered in primary colors. The heroes and villains are all clearly defined, and the kills are merciless. The villainous dogs are cranked to eleven in terms of their attributes and sheer volume. The filmmakers in this film count dogs like John Woo counts bullets: quantity over plausibility. Strap in and let it happen.
A Breed Apart is anchored by sincerity from Grace Caroline Currey as the attentive viewers’ surrogate and vapidity from Virginia Gardner as the disaffected. It’s acceptable to dissect the film as Violet would or to float through it as high and unconcerned as Thalia. Either way, a good time is to be found.
The Interview
We had the opportunity to speak with filmmakers Griff Furst and Nathan Furst about their approach to A Breed Apart, their views on influencer and creator culture, and the necessity of a good pseudonym.
Eric McClanahan:
Hey guys, how are we doing today?
Nathan Furst:
Hey, how are you, man?
Griff Furst:
Hey, Eric.
Eric McClanahan:
I’m well, thank you. I’m living the dream here. So I know I’m talking to Griff and Nathan, but if you guys could sound off so I know who’s who.
Nathan Furst:
I’m Nathan.
Griff Furst:
I’m Griff.
Nathan Furst:
Together!
Eric McClanahan:
All right. Thank you guys so much for talking to me. We’re talking about the film A Breed Apart. First off, where did the idea come to sort of reinvent or reinvigorate the film The Breed?
Nathan Furst:
It came to us.
Griff Furst:
It was pitched to us to remake The Breed by the company that has the rights to the original Breed. And they said, ‘This is a cult classic.’ A lot of people are still watching it. We want to make a second one. And then we watched it and we said, well, we will make a second one, but not in the same tone because that tone just felt like very 20 years ago, even though I appreciate that movie. And so I asked Nathan, who is the king of coming up with new, fresh ideas.
Nathan Furst:
A very generous title.
Griff Furst:
He came up with the movie within the movie, and this very meta idea. And I said, okay, I can fuck with that. And then we went from there.
Nathan Furst:
That’s it.
Eric McClanahan:
There you go. So this isn’t your first creature feature; you guys have played around with the killer animal trope. [So many shark movies] Were there any gears to switch going into Dogs?
Griff Furst:
The only gear to switch was to try to do new stuff. Because I’ve done and you’ve done a lot of creature features, too. And a lot of the time, they have been brought to me and presented to me in a certain kind of box or playground. And it’s like “stay in these marks,” and a lot of it ends up wanting to be derivative. On this one, luckily, we had the freedom to kind of go wherever we wanted because it wasn’t a straight-ahead creature feature. And so I’d say the big difference is creating fun things like Bottlenose, that’s a new character. He’s trying to make each gag fresh and original and something we haven’t seen before.
Nathan Furst:
And one thing I think we had to do was, especially with regards to the first Breed, one thing it does is it’s a creature feature, but it still stays somewhat in the realm of natural, right? The dogs, they’re angry and rabid for whatever reason, but they’re sort of just dogs, right? They’re still dogs. And in this one, I think we had to sort of realized that we needed to abandon that and make them creatures, like just where you lean into the fact that it is a creature movie and we’re going to make them super dogs that can climb trees and jump off of cliffs and swim into the ocean.
Griff Furst:
And there are thousands of them.
Nathan Furst:
And there are hundreds of them, thousands of them, and they don’t – they end up sounding like not normal dogs. And we decided that that was probably the best way to just lean into that and just go full creature feature. Like almost pulp.
Eric McClanahan:
Yeah, and that’s, it’s funny because when I first got the email, like, hey, do you want to watch this film? And it said what it was. I was like, uh. I don’t really know how interesting that’s going to be.
Nathan Furst:
You and me both. It’s like me because they email me, and I go, I don’t know how interesting this is going to be.
Eric McClanahan:
Yeah. But when I looked deeper into it, and I finally watched the film, I was impressed with the tone that you guys chose. So I like that a lot. Now, is this a celebration of creator culture, with these internet personality characters, or is this a skewer of creator culture?
Nathan Furst:
What do you think?
Griff Furst:
It’s an examination of both. Like, because he’s Gen X, by a couple of years, I’m a millennial. So I appreciate creator culture for what it is. I think it’s a dope profession and platform to create on. But I think most filmmakers don’t see it that way. And all the influencers I’ve seen in horror movies to date have been kind of a caricature of an influencer, and like them getting killed and not understanding what they do. And so we kind of use the characters of Violet (Grace Caroline Currey) and Collins (Zak Steiner) to have these discussions that [Nathan] and I had behind the scenes when we were writing the script.
Nathan Furst:
Real scenes. There were real conversations we had, yeah.
Griff Furst:
Yeah, and I’m Collins and he’s Violet. And so we just put those into the text, and we wanted it to be kind of an examination of those two different viewpoints of greater culture and its impact on our culture as a whole, and what it means, because I think that’s shifting for sure. And I think it’s played out to put influencers in a movie just to caricaturize them and kill them without actually appreciating what it is that they do and contribute.
Nathan Furst:
But we definitely are intentionally sort of serving that up. But then what was so nice is, and we put it in the script too, that we can see that these characters are not just these influencers. They’re real people trying to do stuff. And then the actors brought in something too, which makes you care about each one of them. At the same time that you can sort of roll your eyes a little bit at some of the stuff they’re doing, which is how I get my little influence in there. But it’s nice because they just really, they’re just all amazing characters that you love to be frustrated with, but also want to be friends with. And the actors did an amazing job creating them.
Eric McClanahan:
Yeah, I got to talk to Page Kennedy already and what he brought to his character, Big Farmer Jay. And I mentioned that his character is somewhat capable. He’s one of the more capable people who are put into the dog thresher. And I thought that was very I thought that was freeing, you know, making him someone who could handle a situation like that.
Nathan Furst:
Oh, yeah, for sure.
Eric McClanahan:
Going back to creature features being limiting and putting you in a box: Griff, who is Louis Myman? (The pseudonym Furst used while directing 2008’s 100 Million B.C. and 2013’s Alligator Alley.)
Griff Furst:
Louis Myman is, uh, do you know Alan Smithee?
Eric McClanahan:
Yes.
Griff Furst:
It’s Alan Smithee’s brother. [laughs]
Nathan Furst:
That’s one way to do it.
Griff Furst:
Yeah, I mean, it’s a tough thing. It’s an interesting thing to explore. It’s like when you do a creature feature, especially like these, because when I first got an opportunity to direct, I was an actor, and I was just offered an opportunity to direct. And it happened to be these sci-fi channel movies, which I know you’ve seen plenty of. It’s like, then when you do one and it rates well and it does well, they just offer you more of them. And when you’re in your mid-20s, directing, and people keep offering you things to direct and paying you for it. It’s like, cool. You’ll keep doing those. And I made a dozen or more of them. And they bought me my house.
But at the same time, it’s like when I’ll opt for something like really artful, and it’s like, it’s hard to get that. It makes it harder to get that done, then because people are like, “that’s a great script that you have.” And it’s like, “yeah, I’ve studied screenwriting and what makes a good story my entire life.” But they’ll be like, “But can you make me a killer dog movie instead?” And it’s like, “yeah, I can still do that too.” And I love them, don’t get me wrong. I grew up watching all these creature features like Mysterious Island and Jaws, Cujo, or whatnot. I love those movies, but I love ALL kinds of movies.
Griff Furst:
But so the creature feature, itself, is like a little box. That’s what I like about The Breed. It’s like because you can, if given the permission, and the permission on this one is like it’s rated R; it’s not a TV movie. So we had a lot more liberty to discuss things like the dichotomy between, like, creator culture and traditional filmmakers, and do other things you couldn’t typically do. So that makes it even more fun and less limiting. Yeah, I don’t know if I answered the question, but I like the question.
Nathan Furst:
In truth, a lot of people don’t realize it’s not just actors who get typecast. Everybody in the film industry, in every aspect, down to like a crew member who does what they do, has nothing to do with the genre, per se. But people get typecast.
Griff Furst:
Yeah, if you’re with a union, IATSE, for example, and you say that I’m a focus puller, it’s like, that’s what you are. And it’s very hard to move to another thing because it’s like, that’s what I do. Then that’s what you do. And so, yeah, with filmmakers, it’s the same thing. It’s like they If you do creature features, I can probably do 70 more creature features because I’ll just keep getting calls about them.
Nathan Furst:
It happens on every level. As a composer, when I was exclusively that, it’s like you will get a cartoon. Now you’re going to only get cartoon offers, or you do a horror film, you’re only going to get B-movie horror offers, or you do an action movie, you’re only going to get those, you know. Yey, Everybody gets typecast, so you kind of have to figure out how you’re going to balance that.
Eric McClanahan:
Yeah, you’ve got to take the reins yourself. I think I have time for one last question, and it’s going to be about casting. Great job getting the band back together from Fall with Ginny and Grace together again on screen. Did you have to fight for either of them, or did that just fall into place?
Nathan Furst:
It found its way, yeah?
Griff Furst:
It kind of naturally found its way. We wanted Grace to play Violet, and we knew that, and we cast Grace, and we got her pretty early on in the casting process, and we started looking at other roles, and we had the idea because we liked Fall, which is the reason we knew Grace is from Fall. So we said we wanted to cast Ginny [Gardner]. We had the idea to cast Ginny as Collins so they could play brother and sister.
Nathan Furst:
Yes, that’s right.
Griff Furst:
So they could play sisters. They were written as sisters.
Nathan Furst:
Originally, yeah.
Griff Furst:
And so we asked Grace, we said, “Hey, we like the idea of casting Ginny as Collins.” And she’s like, “That’s cool. I love that idea too.” And so we did that. Then, right before we started shooting, Ginny decided that she didn’t want to play Collins anymore, and she liked the role of Talia better. And we liked that idea, too, so that’s why we made that switch. So it kind of naturally fell into place. But yeah, it started with Grace, and then Grace permitted us to go to Ginny. I had no idea if they were real friends in real life. It turns out they’re very close. And so that’s, yeah, that’s how that one came together.
Eric McClanahan:
Nice. Well, I think that’s our time. Thank you guys so much for talking to me. I appreciate it.
Nathan Furst:
Thank you.
Griff Furst:
Good to talk to you, too. Take care, man. Bye.
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