Interview: Brandon Christensen for ‘Bodycam’

Writer/director Brandon Christensen discusses his latest horror film, the found-footage inspired Bodycam.

The found-footage horror genre is one that never ceases to surprise and delight in its simplicity and logistical complexity. Never one to sit still, horror writer/director Brandon Christensen takes a swing at the genre with his latest horror feature, Bodycam, crafting a tense viewing experience that never lets up.

In Bodycam, the film follows two police officers who expect their patrol to be the same old, same old. That is, until they receive a call about a domestic incident, prompting them to drive by and investigate. A cascading series of events within the household culminates in a tragedy for the family, putting the police officers in a precarious situation. What initially starts as a cover-up escalates into a fight for their lives as the community rises in ways that surprise and horrify.

For the release of Bodycam, we spoke with co-writer/director Brandon Christensen about the film. Throughout our conversation, we discussed the logistics of capturing the film’s definitive first-person body-cam perspective, how Jurassic World inspired the film’s lengthy story development, and how they achieved that wild city-bending CGI sequence.

This interview does feature some spoilers from Bodycam. Reader discretion is advised.

I watched Bodycam right after a run of Resident Evil Requiem, which was the best/worst mistake I could have made. Going from watching that to this first-person body-cam perspective was really impactful. I kept jumping out at every shadow. Can you talk a little bit about adjusting the shooting style for that first-person perspective? I imagine you had to reframe how you’d set a scene and block everything.

It was super interesting. I didn’t know, going into it, how it was going to go. My cinematographer, Clayton Moore, and I were anticipating that he would wear the body cam because I have a friend, Stuart Ortiz, who did Strange Harvest shortly before we shot ours, and he said, “Make sure your DP shoots everything so you can see it right.” And I was just like, okay, that’s probably going to be how we do it.

But then, we built this rig for the actors to wear, and when we saw them wearing it and shooting the scenes, it had such realism to it that it was just like, “Oh, this might work.” They might be able to do the whole thing. That freed us a ton, because it allowed us not to have to think too much about that side. And again, like the blocking, like you were saying, was so vital, because I would be somewhere off in, either another room or another building, or outside or something, watching the live feed.

Every scene in this movie is almost like a master shot, so many things have to happen, because you’re not relying on traditional inserts or close-ups or things like that. So, it was almost like directing a stage play, every scene, because every scene had to evolve and had to move in a way that was interesting. As a director watching that happen, my notes were often not like, “Okay, well, we got to tweak the focus here,” or stuff like that. It was just like, “Okay, he needs to turn and see this thing, okay. He needs to wait two seconds before saying that.” It was such a technical thing to make sure that they were not only performing and doing the lines.

But they were like an old Resident Evil character and the pre-rendered backgrounds. They had to move like tanks to make sure that the camera shot what they needed to shoot. And so, it was just really interesting to watch unfold, because the actor would do their performance, and then they would put the vest on, and they would all of a sudden do the performance while also being a cameraman, and we had to totally trust them, and they totally nailed it.

It was just really fascinating to watch the whole thing, but it also allowed us to work really quickly, because we shot this in 12 days, and each scene had at most two shots. And that’s unheard of in movie-making.

Were the 12 days due to permitting? It looks like almost everything was actual locations, except for the effects that appear later in the film. Was it just permitting and stuff like that, or just budget?

Chris Ball, one of our producers, is very well learned in all the permitting and stuff like that. He’s got the relationships with everybody. So, he worked harder than anybody. We would be working all night for most of the shoot. And so from six to six, we would be on set, and then he would have to wake up at like nine or ten and start dealing with that day’s shooting, like, let the police know, “Hey, we’re going to be in this dilapidated area. Please don’t send cops when you see another cop car.” And he would be dealing with all those aspects, then going to set, handling costuming, and handling all that stuff. I don’t know when he slept. I don’t know how he did it, but he did it.

It was like five or six of us shooting this film, and that was just about right for what we needed, but it was super indie and a different approach. I kind of did something similar on Superhost, where that was, like, a five-person crew, and I love it. It’s this very intimate group of people you love and trust, and you can just sort of, like, really create something together, and it feels really impactful because everybody’s made such a huge contribution.

I’m always fascinated by that whole logistical nightmare that is locations, because it seems like a lot.

The nice thing was that because we were so small, I think people let us in.  We weren’t gonna have a big footprint. We weren’t gonna make a big mess. It was very tight and tidy. And we’re also in Calgary, where I think that people aren’t quite as jaded about the film industry yet. You know, you go to Vancouver, and you’re trying to find locations, it’s insanely expensive. These giant shows come in, people know there’s money, and then there’s an expectation of, like, you’re going to take care of me, right? And you know, when we’re looking for these dilapidated places, it’s a little bit different. So, yeah, that definitely helped a lot.

Switching gears to the screenplay, this movie feels timely for a lot of reasons, both in the States and in Canada. What was the initial inspiration, and how did that idea blossom into what viewers are going to be able to see?

The aesthetic of shooting a body cam movie, that came from years prior, in like 2015, 2016, when Jurassic World came out. There’s a sequence near the end with these Raptors wearing cameras, watching from, like, a control room as they attack and go on this mission. And I just remember watching that, and maybe I was just bored by the rest of the movie, but I was just like, “Oh, that’s such an interesting thing. Maybe I should do a short film about that.” And I hadn’t even done my first feature yet, so I kind of put that idea in my back pocket.

Around 2020 and 2021, (producer) Kurt Harder and I were talking about this body cam idea. We started spitballing ideas, and the accidental shooting thing came up. He was doing Influencer. I was doing Puppet Man and Superhost, and it was just too busy to land on it then. Fast forward a couple more years, and my brother [Ryan] and I had started writing together. I brought up the idea of the initial accidental shooting idea.

Then we started discussing the sort of drug addicts in the streets that you see on YouTube. There are a lot of YouTube videos of people standing around, and they kind of looked like zombies, and I was like, “Oh, maybe that’s what’s going on in this movie.” Like, maybe there’s this thing happening in the city that we’re not aware of, and the cops aren’t aware of. It’s not what it appears to be. It’s not drug addiction. It’s people who are just waiting to be used for a different purpose, a higher calling, or something like that. And that just sort of started to really snowball.

The accidental shooting is a great catalyst, but we needed to kind of go deeper than that, and that was where we looked. Let’s take this surface-level thing and the below, and let’s really explore that.

That leads into my next question. I’m assuming some of it was for budget reasons, in terms of just figuring out how to do that, especially in that location where it is featured, but can you talk a little bit about conceptualizing who is “Below,” and the decision with VFX versus practical?

The guy who played [it] was this guy, Luke Moore. We actually filmed everything with him as a reference. When we shot the film, we didn’t have a VFX company attached. It was just very loose. We thought we’d figure it out later. When we hired this company, RCS Studios, out of Vancouver, we started talking about it. Would it be possible? I mean, there are only six seconds we need to do, but would it be possible to replace him with something a little more bold? So, we came up with some ideas.

What I really liked was when we were at Jackson’s mom’s house, and she’s clearly rehabbing drug addicts there, and they have these IVs, we used that as a central design element for this thing to have. It almost looks like tentacles going to the ceiling, like those IVs, and it’s like she’s rehabbing, and maybe he’s controlling. There’s this interesting duality there, where it’s like she’s trying to get people healthy, and he’s trying to get people with him. There’s almost like this God versus the devil evil kind of back-and-forth thing going on in this area that, at first glance, you’re not going to expect going into the film. 

I’ve never done anything like that before, having CG to that level. And for me, it was just such a fascinating thing to watch and see how it evolved with this team. We didn’t have the money to do it in a timely manner, but I thought they did a great job overall.

All I kept thinking was, during the one scene where he’s just driving and driving, what a nightmare to keep that continuity and try to make sure everything is in line from a VFX standpoint. I could imagine just the technical of trying to have you guys tackle that with the VFX team in post.

That was tough. We had no idea how we would do it. And then when this team had it, they had extensive Unreal Engine capabilities. We designed an entire city and mapped out this layout, and everything is just fake and designed for the movie. When we shot it, we took the car into the Volume, and we had the scene playing in front of him.

So, Jaime [Callica], when he was acting, he could actually watch, like a video game, as he was steering, when the car steered, and the lights were interacting with him. It made the compositing of everything really easy because it was all practically recorded. It wasn’t just like a green screen or something like that. Everything that is there is there.

It was just such an interesting thing that I’d never done before. It was fun on such a small project to swing so big on something like that. To their credit, it works. It totally holds up.

With the world you’ve established in Bodycam, are there thoughts of potential sequels or anything like that? Because, of course, I think of Paranormal Activity and how that surprisingly blew up. There’s so much planted in this story, so I can see the potential.

It’s something that I’ve definitely thought of. I’ve had three years since we shot it to kind of have that thought, but right now, there are no plans for it. Once the movie comes out, that kind of dictates everything.

That’s true.

If it does do really well and people demand it, that could change it. Right now, it was written to be just a one-and-done, but that’s what always happens. You never expect that to happen, and if I’m fortunate enough for it to have that kind of impact, where people are looking for more, yeah, I would totally revisit this idea, and, you know, make some more because we just scratched the surface on what you can do with this aesthetic. The possibilities are super endless. And so I wouldn’t not be interested in exploring more.

Bodycam is now streaming exclusively on Shudder and AMC+. Watch the trailer below and check out our review here.

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Images courtesy of Shudder/Laine Farber. Read more articles by Sarah Musnicky here.