Exclusive: Bitch Slap Director Rick Jacobson on Chick Fights, “Sexy Women Blowing Shit Up,” and the Freedom of Low-Budget Filmmaking

Share on Facebook posted 01-06-10 by Julina Tatlock

If you’re lucky enough to live in New York City, San Francisco, or Los Angeles, you’ve got a tailor-made excuse to grab some 40′s with a bunch of friends and head to the movie theater on January 8, because that’s the day that Bitch Slap, a brand-new B-movie exploitation film, opens in your city. While this picture’s not going to win any art-film awards, it’s pretty much a guarantee that it will provide plenty of exultantly schlocky fodder for drinking games having to do with boob or ass shots or the like. If you don’t live in New York, don’t worry; all you have to do is order it on pay-per-view to get Bitch Slap‘s sleazy pleasures in the comfort of your own home. Still need more inducement? The flick features Kevin Sorbo and Lucy Lawless, the 1990′s cable-kitsch icons who played Hercules and Xena: Warrior Princess. (Fans of blank-eyed beefcake and steamy subtextual Lesbian romance, rejoice!)

Now, it may seem that little thought goes into a movie that’s all T&A with a healthy side dish of violence, but when Bitch Slap director Rick Jacobson spoke with 30 Ninjas Editor-in-Chief Julina Tatlock the other day, he had a lot to say about crafting the flick and about walking the line between “so bad it’s good” and so bad it’s just really, really bad.

The “Self-Proclaimed Greatest Chick Fight in Cinema History”

30 NINJAS: Bitch Slap looks like an action romp. Tell me about the action sequence that an action fan is going to love the most.

RICK JACOBSON: The whole film was conceived and designed right from the get-go to be an easy sell. It was designed to be something that the male audience would like to see: hot, sexy women blowing shit up, getting into fights, kicking guys’ asses, and driving fast cars — and hopefully the women who see it will see the kind of film that they don’t see too often: a girl power film. It’s the females who are saving the day, and the females who are driving the story, and the females who are getting into fights and getting bloody. They are not the victims.

But really, the standout action scene is what we call our Self-Proclaimed Greatest Chick Fight in Cinema History: It’s essentially a nine-and-s-half minute fight between two of our characters. I usfe John Carpenter’s alley fight from They Live as a high-water mark — and tried to beat it. It kind of made me laugh, and it’s a bit out of the box to do a girl fight to those extremes. You’ve seen [chick fights] a lot ,and a lot of times they are just kind of catty, or they always end up falling in the mud or something kind of goofy. But this is just a real kind of two-fisted, gritty, gnarly, dirty fight, and it’s a lot of fun. Right when my partner and I had finished writing the thing, we turned to Zoe Belle, who we had worked with for years on Xena [for which Jacobson directed a dozen episodes], and she was our first and only choice to be our stunt coordinator… She’s really carved a name for herself and is arguably the number one female stunt woman in Hollywood. So we thought it would be cool to not only have a female stunt coordinator coordinate some of the greatest chick fights of history, but also it was a chance for Zoe to add a feather to her cap since she had never been a stunt coordinator before. Thankfully, the schedules and everything worked out.

There is all kinds of great action in the film: There are motorcycle chases, and car stuff, lots of great explosions, a shoot-out, and a big action scene that takes place up in the Swiss Alps — but what’s kind of most memorable and most notable is the big fight scene at the end. It’s just a lot of good over-the-top wacky chaos.

Low-Budget Highs: Pulling Big Rabbits Out of Small Hats and Giving Studio Hacks the Heave-Ho

30 NINJAS: You developed and wrote this film specifically to be produced independent from the studio system. Can you talk about the freedom of doing a small-budget film?

RJ: Well, we felt the creative freedoms right from the get-go. This film was founded out of a frustration with the industry and where my career was at the time and dealing with producers who weren’t producers. Over my career and making films, I’ve had more than my share of films just driven into the ground by people who make bad decisions or just simply don’t know what they are doing. I just got to the point where I just needed to my own thing. I needed to bet the farm on myself. I grew up making films and I’ve been making films since I was in fifth grade, and I love making film. It’s real easy in Hollywood to just get caught up in the business side of Hollywood, and filmmaking can become not very fun. And I wanted to get back to the fun days of filmmaking.

In the process of me writing the story, I was having dinner with my partner, Eric Gruendemann, and he had hit the same wall in his career, and I gave him a soft pitch on the idea and his eyes lit up and he thought, Wow, that sounds great! And essentially it was like, “Well, do you want to work on it together?” I could not have asked for a better partner to work on it with. We spent about a year and a half developing and writing the script together, and the entire time the whole idea was to get back to fun filmmaking. We had a lot of investors read the script and go, “Oh My God, this is amazing and we want to be a part of it.” And we always graciously said, “Thank you, but no thank you,” because we wanted to only have to answer to ourselves. So by doing that, I mean literally Eric and I only had ourselves to answer to. We had absolutely no one else. We did have another couple of investors who came in and gave us money, but they just passed the buck and said, “Go make your movie,” so that was great.

To have that kind of flexibility and creative freedom was something that I’ve never gotten to experience in my 18 years of directing professionally. And in doing so came the most enjoyable experience that I’ve had on a film. It was certainly one of the hardest but the most rewarding, just because we didn’t have to run things by the studio or run things through executive producers and that whole chain. Or have the producers who would come in and they would put 50 percent of the money in and say, “Oh and by the way, I want my daughter to play one of the leads” and ‘”Oh, but your daughter has never acted before,” “Yeah, well, I want her to be one of the leads.” I had experienced that before, so we wanted to cut all of that stuff out, and we were successful in doing so.

30 NINJAS: What was the budget for the film?

RJ: Well, we like to keep that pretty close to the chest, but we like to say it was under 5 million. I have made a career out of pulling big rabbits out of small hats.

Ummm … What’s With All the Greenscreen?

30 NINJAS: You did a lot with that limited amount of money, especially for an action film. It seems like you made creative and stylistic choices that would work for the film and probably also cut a lot out of the budget. So many action films at the moment are obsessed with visual effects that appear realistic and seamless within the world of the film, but it doesn’t look like you were too worried about that.

RJ: We have an A story that runs along in real time (when the girls arrive in the desert, why they are out there and everything kind of transpires out in the desert). And then we have a B story that we intercut with the A story, but the B story runs in reverse, à la the film Memento, and by the time both stories end they clash with the big reveal and the truth about who people really are. There are many fun twists to the story. Early on we had planned for everything to be done real, but as we got closer to filming and closer to putting the budgets together and putting the schedule together [for] doing all of the flashback stuff on real location it just became way too expensive and just didn’t work at all into the schedule. So I kind of just threw out this idea of “Hey, why don’t we shoot everything in the flashback world against greenscreen?” That allows us to go to Las Vegas, go to the Swiss Alps, to these metropolitan cities and tell the story that needs to be told but tell it in kind of a Sin City-esque style, giving the B story a signature look. The technique not only serves the story from the storytelling standpoint but also it is a visual identifier as to “Hey, we are in flashback mode here.” So while it was born out of necessity for the budget, it became very much a creative and stylistic choice.

On our budget, we couldn’t go toe to toe with ILM, for example, so right off the bat the style had to be devised where … we’re not saying it’s real; I call it hyper-real. It’s kind of got this cool look to it, but also a little off, kind of graphic novel-y. We are pretty proud of the way it came out. Like I said, we can’t match an ILM, but certainly for what we were able to do with the time and budget we had, we had as many effects shots in Bitch Slap as there were in the new Incredible Hulk film. We had about 800 visual effects shots. So to do that on our time and budget is really a credit to the people that we got involved with on the film — the support we got from friends and friends of friends. It was very much an independent film, and it was all based on getting back to the fun days of filmmaking. We would go to effects artists, hat in hand, and say, “Hey look, we are doing this little film. Take a look at this, we would love you guys to do this if you want to be part of it, [and] here is what we can pay — it’s a fraction of what you guys normally get — but we would love to have you.” And nine times out of ten people would read the material and go, “OMG, I got to be part of this — absolutely, you guys sound fun!“ And that’s how this movie got made.

30 NINJAS: You’re walking the line with a film like Bitch Slap. How do you tell the difference between “it’s so bad it’s good,” and it’s so bad, it’s just really, really bad?

RJ: I think anyone who sees the film, its outrageousness and inherently its situation is what is funny. Doing a film like this, its very hard to balance just what you are talking about, that fine line between complete camp and just, “Hey, we the filmmakers are in on the joke and are winking a ong with everything else.” We found that the way to make it work is that everyone plays it dead serious while this outrageously ridiculous dialogue comes spewing out of these girls’ mouths and they say it with an absolute straight face — like they are completely serious and they completely believe what they are saying. And it just becomes fun and cool. And as the film progresses it becomes more and more outrageous and the wardrobe gets more fun and the situation get more and more out of control and it is always kind of done with a wink and a smile.