Fangoria Magazine
"May" Article - March 2003

Writer/Director Lucky McKee creates a memorable antiheroine who just wants to be friends - even if it kills you.

Article Written By:  Jeremiah Kipp w/ Fangoria Magazine

Opening with a bloodcurdling scream and a gouged-out eye, writier/director Lucky McKee's May announces itself right away as a horror film.  "I like mystery and I like surprise," says the Los Angeles-based filmmaker, "but I also think it's effective when the audience knows exactly what's going to happen.  Right at the start of May, they see a violent flash showing something bloody that's later see in full at the end.  Then they forget all about it, as we get into the story.  Yet somehow they're still surprised at the final scene.  While they already know the awful thing that's about to happen, they just can't believe it."

That sets the freaky, off-kilter tone for McKee's modern take on the Frankenstein myth.  May (Angela Bettis, who also played NBC's Carrie), a lonely teenager with no friends, finds gruesome ways of achieving companionship involving severed limbs, stitching and multiple murders on Halloween night.  But McKee takes his time building to his gore-soaked climax; May is first & foremost a quirky, often poiganat story of teen isolation.

A mess of contradictions, the sweet and insecure May finds her sole pleasures in obsessive sewing of homemade garments and her job as an assistant vet stitching up wounded animals.  Her only friend is an antique Gothic doll preserved in a glass case, and her lazy eye and strange habits have made her a social outcast at school.  Despite these setbacks, May might have finally foudn the boy of her dreams in Adam (Jeremy Sisto of Hideaway), a student filmmaker who professes to love things that are weird and gross.  But their budding relationship goes awry, and after being further burned by a casually flirtatious lesbian co-worker (Scary Movie's Anna Faris), May is pushed over the edge.  She recalls some advice given to her by her mother---"If you can't find a friend, make one"---and takes that well-intentioned though to mordid extremes.

Following the success of The Blair Witch Project, the Sundance Film Festival proved a perfect launching pad for May.  Sundance apprears to welcome low-budget, character-driven horror films that provide genuine scares and don't play out as self-conscious postmodern comedies, and McKee was able to secure distrubition from Lions Gate Films.  May opens in limited theatrical release on January 31st, with a video debut June 3.

McKee previously made a digital video feature shot on location in Skull County, California entitled All Cheerleaders Die with the help of co-director and USC film school graduate Chris Siverton.  This another high school nightmare, though unlike May, this one is played for camp value.  McKeeconsiders it a vauable stepping stone in his horror career.

"We couldn't get a movie started with any prodcution companies, because we were fresh out of film school," McKee says.  "So for better or for worse, we bought our own camera and one of the first PC editing systems and decided to make one ourselves.  We basically put ourselves through feature school on this crazy zombie movie, and that experience totally paid off when we went into production of May."

Fate would seem tot smile upon you with a name like Lucky McKee, and the financing for May fell into place out of the blue.  While considering what his follow-up to All Cheerleaders Die would be, McKee recevied a phone call from Marius Balchunas, a producer at the new production company 2Loop Films.  "He was someone I went to college with," McKee recalls, "May got made because her remembered my script from four years earlier, and he had the money to make a feature.  It was terrific, because I was able to assemble my group of filmmaker friends and shoot something in Panavision.  We made it happen, and a year later I was at Sundance!"  McKee seems as surprised by how May came together as anyone else. 

Told with distinctive look and style, May is incredibly polished comsidering the rushed production schedule of 17 days.  McKee chalks that up to his familiarity with the crew, made up largely of colleagues he's known since he was a college freshman.  "My director of photography [Steve Yedlin] and I lived right next to each other, and one of my editors was his roommate," he says.  "My other editor and my composer lived on the same floor, too.  For years, we'd be talking about how we'd make out films, but you never know if it's going to work unless you actually do it.  But we trusted each other, and that helped us through the initial 17 days of shooting."

May was a project McKee had been thinking about for years, and some of his short student films at USC were preliminary sketches of the title character.  "I made a short video called Fraction starring my composer [Jaye Barnes-Luckett] as the May character," he reveals.  "It actually has pretty much the same structure and themes as the feature-length version.  I wrote my full screenplay the following year, when I was 18 or 19 years old---around the same age Mary Shelley was when she wrote Frankenstein.  It was the third or fourth script I had written, and for the first time I felt I had communicated what I wanted to.  It's my teen angst story, really."

While writing the screenplay, McKee found inspiration in Roman Polanski's nightmarish Repulsion and the existential dread of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver.  He also drew thematic cues from the grunge rock of Nirvana and the melancholy poetics of their lead singer, Kurt Cobain.  "Their music spoke to me, saying that you could just go off on things," McKee says.  "You could scream and yell and be imperfect, but still get people's attention and speak to them,  It's the imprefections that make somehting special.  I like when Kurt Cobain's voice cracks or his guitar's a little bit our of tune.  I also find it incredibly sad that he blew his head off, thinking he didn't have any friends around him.  It's the same thing with May.  She has her own unique quality, but nobody wants to be around her to see it."  ...

...PART 2