Interview! My Bloody Valentine 3D director Patrick Lussier talks Trick

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

For those of you out there that might not know, MY BLOODY VALENTINE 3D and DRIVE ANGRY writing-directing team, Patrick Lussier and Todd Farmer have a new Halloween horror-thriller coming our way called TRICK starring Omar Epps, Tom Atkins, and Jamie Kennedy. The story centers on an elusive serial killer, who descends upon a small town each Halloween and has been responsible for gruesome murders year after year. Omar Epps heads the cast as Detective Mike Denver who has faced Trick once before and knows he's still out there – and he's coming back for revenge.

RLJE Films will unleash TRICK into theaters and digital day-and-date later this month. And today we had the chance to sit down and chat with Lussier about the film, working with Todd Farmer again, dealing with the MPAA, and more. Check it out below!

As a horror fan, let me say that it's great to see you and Todd Farmer working together again.

We never really stopped working together we just stopped getting movies made [laughs].

Yeah, like the HELLRAISER remake you guys were attached to back in the day. Sad to see that never came to be.

Yeah, HELLRAISER was a very fun experience to set out on. And it became a very exhausting experience not to have made. Because we wrote so many different versions and got so far away from our favorite version.  

How did your new Halloween slasher flick TRICK come about?

After MY BLOODY VALENTINE, we thought we were going to do a sequel but then that never happened. Then we did DRIVE ANGRY and then we had talked about wanting to do another slasher film and started off with a series of what-ifs. And then 30 what-ifs later you have a movie. And it started with Halloween and having a different sort of killer on Halloween. What if it was this? What if it was that? What if it was everything you see you can't trust?

Did the ending come first or did you write towards it?

We had a variety of different endings but once we had the ending that you see, that informed everything and we wrote everything else we did ahead of it, to lay all the groundwork for it. And you know we really just wanted to make a slasher noir detective movie. 

We've already heard talks about a TRICK sequel/franchise. Is that true?

Yes, that is there certainly, I hope. If we were lucky enough to do more of them Todd and I have certainly discussed what the continuing adventure could be should that opportunity present itself. And at the same time, we feel that the film totally stands on its own. It's not one of those things like "Oh my God, I have to know what happens next!" You can imagine what happens next, but we would surely be willing to show you what happens next. 

Did you have any issues with the MPAA this time around?

We never dealt with the MPAA that I'm aware of. Certainly as an editor on the original SCREAM with Wes Craven, we went back nine times and had huge challenges. And with MY BLOODY VALENTINE, it got rejected the first time, but we stack the deck a little in our favor because we knew the thing that they would go after so we made it three-times longer, even though that was never the version we were ever going to go with. Just knowing that that they would go "Oh, God!" and become so focused on that that they ignored virtually everything else. So hopefully they won't, you know, read this interview and begin to uncover the secrets of how we deal with them. 

How is it collaborating with Todd Farmer these days?

You know, so much of it is the same. We used to write back and forth because we never really lived close to each other. But now we go at it on Google Drive. And we'll literally be working on the same document at the same time before we go to the scripting phase. We can both watch each other type and we'll start a racing game, or re-write someone else's sentence as the other is typing the first part. We get on the phone on occasion and we spitball back and forth. But we have this sort of community doc and one of us will write the stuff in and the next day somebody else will read it and go and leave notes. Sometimes on the treatments, I'll blaze the trail and then on scripts, he'll blaze the trails. All of that's very in sync and it all usually starts with the conversation 'Hey what if x?' And then we sort of just spitball like a couple of teenagers talking about their favorite whatever.  

What's next?

I just finished directing an episode of THE PURGE, which airs on September 2nd, I think. Then I'm co-writing a pilot with the gentleman who gave me my very first job in the film industry. Then Todd and I have three or four other things on the go that we're looking to get set-up. We keep dipping back into the trunk of ideas and resurrecting old things and finding new things to go with them. We have two things that we're very close to getting set-up!

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And there you have it, folks. That was our interview with MY BLOODY VALENTINE and DRIVE ANGRY director Patrick Lussier. His new film TRICK will be hitting theaters and digital day-and-date on October 18, 2019. Thanks for chatting with us, Patrick!