An accomplished director with years of experience working in various genres and styles, Mark Savage has tons of qualities that make him the perfect choice for the recently-released thriller Pain Killer, which is ripped from the headlines involving the opioid crisis plaguing the US. Now, I talk with him about the creation of the film, some stories about filming it and what's coming up next from him.
Me: Hello and thank you for taking the time to do this. What can you tell us about your new film, "Pain Killer?"
Mark Savage: Well, thank you for that! Yeah, Pain Killer is about a father who loses his daughter to opioids, and rather than blame the ones who created the drug goes after the organization illegally supplying it to the community. The size of it is more than he expected and gets into an unexpected relationship with someone he didn't expect as he grieves for the loss of his daughter. As he comes to find out, the doctors are basically pushing opioids to people other than people for who those were initially created for. It's a thriller, a genre film but within a genre film it's about a father who loses his daughter but also gets tied up with these bad doctors. These bad doctors are responsible for turning these drugs who were initially teating people with pain like going through chemotherapy and end up od'ing because the addiction is so strong.
Me: Where did the inspiration for the film come from? Were there any unique stories about its conception?
MS: My co-writer, Tom Parnell, lost his son three years ago to opioids. His 21-year-old son died of an opioid overdose and was on opioids as a result of pain from playing sports, mainly baseball. So we made a film a few years ago called Stressed to Kill, and when we were thinking of what to do next we thought let's take two characters from that film, Bill Oberst, he was the lead in that film, and another guy who played the doctor who was actually Tom himself (Tom the co-writer plays a doctor in the movie) and so we decided to incorporate that story into the new thriller.
Me: Being a co-writer with actor Tom Parnell, what was the working relationship like between you two during the writing phase?
MS: We started with an outline and went back-and-forth for a couple of months. We outlined it first and then don't really start writing until we got the structure right. We did some research on the opioid industry and found out about off-target marketing where they market drugs to people who are not initially targeted, how many people have died and what a huge problem it is.
After the research, we did the structuring and from there we started with another writer, David Richardson, so all three of us took one-third of the script and wrote scenes. Basically, you write the first third, I'll do the middle and then the last act, and after that for the rewrites we got together again, went through our notes and do another rewrite. One of us would take more notes and do another rewrite and so on. It was truly a collaborative effort.
Me: With a cast of experienced and talented indie actors, how'd you settle on the cast getting involved in the film?
MS: Well, because Bill had been the character initially, he seemed like the natural person to play him. Bill has an everyman quality to him which is one of the reasons I like working with him, that he can even play a killer and engenders enough emotional connection to him. Even though he was a killer, you can still relate to him, the situation that he's in so he was ideal for that.
For the person we chose to be the villain, the main bad doctor, was Michael Paré. I've knnow Michael as a friend for quite a while and had talked about doing something together. When this came about, Michael seemed lie the ideal person for this. He's got a certain charm to him, and also people know him from films like Eddie and the Cruisers, Streets of Fire, stuff like that. So, I like the fact that Michael was alble to go between heinious and charming in the mifst of like ten seconds and can go from a very pateitn doctor and then go into giving a drug addict drugs in exchance gor secual facors and then his girlfriend comes in. So he can go in various shades of good and evil really well and you can only do that with a characater who has a chance to charm the audience icnitially.
Me: Having worked with actor Bill Oberst Jr. on several previous projects, what kind of approach did you take with him on this film? Was there anything specific you wanted to capture with his character?
MS: I think Bill's focus and empathy for the character he plays. He's really good at getting into the skin of the character and staying in that skin, but you can also see his vulnerabilities. But also, Bill's really great at ideas. For example, one scene he brought up because he's lost his child he talks about blaming himself for it. And that was one of bIll's ideas he said shouldn't he have an idea that he feels responsible for it and articulates that. I was like, that's a fantastic idea, because I think it's something parents go through when they lose a child. It's not unusual, especially if your child is very young of course you're going to start asking Why else could I have done? Why wasn't I there? All kinds of blame, and my co-writer Tom went through that the year after his son died. He was devasted, and he'd have conversations with me that touched on subjects like I don't know if I wasn't to live any longer I don't know if I still want to be alive now that my son's gone. That's like the worst thing that can happen, you expect to go before your child, and to lose your child is so out-of-klter of what you believe is the natural order. As a parent, your older you'll die before them but when they die before you it's a horrible thing. And one thing we address in the film too is that there's no name for a parent who loses a child so that's something we were thinking about that there's not only no name for it but is so rare that it hasn't warranted a name for someone in that position even though it's one of the most traumatic things you can go through.
Me: What was the set like while shooting the film? How did the cast and crew react to the type of film being made?
MS: Yeah, I would say, first and foremost, because it was something we felt strongly about we didn't want to do a docudrama so that it was very heavy. We still wanted to make an entertaining piece so we tried to find a balance between the different elements about it, the thriller elements and then also getting the information out and conveying his pain. So onething we created was the story of him being on the radio, which allowed us to get the information out and talking to people on the street and extolling that information to them in a sort of expositional kind of way.
But to me, I was still trying to keep it very vibrant and dynamic in terms of an action/thriller and thread the elements with the opoids and the loss and grief so it still blends in and holds people's attention so it's not heavy-heanded. To me, that's the challenge because I still feel this, that people watch movies to be entertained and so you still focus on that stylistically and keep it dynamic with the lighting and the pacing. We went through a lot of drafts, we wrote about sixteen drafts and a lot of work on the dialog and structure and just make something that's a little more than a genre film.
For Tom's point of view, he was making it as a tribute to his son so that his death could at least be marked by something like thais where maybe people wcould be aware of something like this. He's one of hundreds of thousands of young people, and old people, who have died.
Me: Do you recall having any odd or funny on-set stories about yourself or any of the other cast/crew members?
MS: Well, let met think about that. I suppose, one funny scene where there's an older woman and a younger guy are having sex in a trailer. I remember in the script, I remember tit said she was very scantily-clothed and so she came along and showed me these various costumes. At the end of the scene, I didn't want it to be too explicit and I didn't need it, if you make a decision to show nudity you risk people focusing on that rather than on the content. I don't think anyone's watching Painkiller to see that so I tried to scale back the explicit stuff in the script but when we were done she goes Can I take my top off? and I go no no no, I don't kneed you to do that. We both kinda laughed at that as she was a little bit disappointed that we didn't actually go there in the movie.
That was one of the funny things. It was a pretty serious shoot. We had fun on the set but a lot of the times it was just. Well, one thing I ended up going into the drink myself in one scene. I basically id a fall back into the lake and everyone found that amusing. It was a pretty cold day and I basically just threw myself into the lake. It was not even because I didn't want to ask anyone else to do it in that particular time and we were running out of time and rather than explain how I wanted someone else to fall I just put on a swimsuit and shirt and just did the fall myself.
Me: What are you most looking forward to with it's release?
MS: I hope the film gets widely scene and hope people became a little more aware of the problem. At the same time, I hope that they appreciate it as a vigilante thriller. The distributors of the film, Cinedigm, saw it as a combination of a vigilante film and also highlights this problem on the subject of opioids. I hope people can take either thing out of it, that it's this vigilante film, or say that it illuminated this problem that we're sitll living with. We still have COVID-19 but before then this was the thing that everyone was talking about the most. So it got ecliptsed a little but actually, during the epidemic, the opioid problem has gotten worse and not better I guess that's becaose people are home more and people are dealing with it, but also people who were never at home are now in small spaces and dealing with it so there are domenstic tensions that you never had before because you could go to work and have a little space. When you're all jammed into one space I think it's pretty natural that there's going to be some fireworks.
Me: Lastly, what else are you working on that you'd like to share with our readers? Thank you again for your time!
MS: I'm working on a couple of films. The next one that I'm shooting in July with producer Mark L. Lester and Jeff Miller. Mark was the director of Commando and Firestarter and Class of 1984 we're doing a film called Bring Him Back Dead, that's the next one I'm shooting. After that, I'm doing another one called Advocate, which is in a similar vein to Painkiller but this one is about little league sports.
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