Joseph Kahn, shown at the 2024 premiere of Ick in Toronto, says while a movie might not land when it’s released, it can find its audience years or even decades later.Jemal Countess/Getty Images
Some films make their festival premieres and instantly become must-see events, riding the energy of a world debut into an awards run or box-office glory. Other films – the majority of them, really – arrive at festivals with promise and hopes only to disappoint or, worse yet, disappear. Joseph Kahn’s horror-comedy Ick, which follows one small American town’s battle against extraterrestrial goo, doesn’t quite fit into the latter category. But its reception at the 2024 edition of TIFF wasn’t exactly encouraging, either.
While some critics – myself included – found Ick to be an exhilarating dose of maximalist filmmaking, soundtracked by an early-aughts selection of chart-toppers that infects your brain in the best way possible, others were unable to hop aboard Kahn’s wavelength. It’s a shame, given that it’s the same ahead-of-the-curve sensibility the director has been riding since his days as pop music’s premiere music-video director, working with everyone from Taylor Swift to Mariah Carey.
Now, more than a year after Ick’s TIFF debut, the film will finally be available in Canada on-demand, and Kahn is eager to offer his own perspective on the project’s sticky, if not quite icky, journey.
What has been the journey like since the TIFF 2024 premiere?
To be very honest, I don’t think that the premiere went very well in Canada. I felt like a lot of critics liked it – there’s no other way to put it, a lot of the smart people liked it. But I started realizing, even though the movie isn’t overly political – the politics are done as a joke, not seriously – I stumbled into a very political landscape that was accelerating. This is right before Trump got re-elected, and there’s very outwardly leftist ideas that started percolating, too. The film got tripped up into it because it looked political, but it wasn’t necessarily political.
There were minefields placed there.
We’re making a movie about the experience of millennials growing older, seeing the world pass you by. As a comedy, you accentuate and you hyperbolize. One of the jokes I had was that Gen Z is more “woke” than millennials, but it’s not meant as an insult. It’s a comedic point of departure that’s part of the conflict. One of the woke jokes we made was about, like, a school speaker belonging to “Palestinians for Non-Binaries,” which was just so absurd, because it seems like something Gen Z would do. And this was before Oct. 7. We wrote a joke and it turned into something real, so we all of a sudden got wrapped into the “Free Palestine” movement, and those people would zero in on our movie. Stuff like that. I started realizing movies do not live in their own universe. You have to be hyper-aware of things, and also the world changes. By the time we released the movie, the world had changed.
Diya Rao in Ick, about a small American town’s battle against extraterrestrial goo.VVS
So how much tweaking did you feel you needed to do?
Well, we changed that joke. To be fair, Toronto was my first showing, and I was very happy with the movie. But whenever you see things ... Look, if Kubrick can do a screening and then realize he needs to change things to make it more acceptable, well, you just have to figure out whether it really hurts the movie or not. After Toronto, I changed a few things. Even though the movie is calibrated for my sense of speed, if I want to get 20 per cent more audience, I knew I better slow it down and open it up. I added about five minutes of breathing room back into the film, and I kept improving the visual effects. Our next screening was in Fantastic Fest in Austin, and it went off like gangbusters.
That was a different version than the one that played Toronto?
It was an improved version. But then I took it to Spain, and it did not do well. A lot of Spanish people, they don’t register the nuances of American culture. There’s a joke in the film about Creed, and I felt this film lives and dies by that one joke, and the audience didn’t know who the band was, so it’s flat. ... It’s been an interesting discovery of the commerciality of movies.
Didn’t you have that discovery already when you played your battle-rap comedy Bodied at TIFF in 2017?
But people were agreeable with the politics of Bodied, because as controversial as that film was, it was making a progressive point, which is that censorship is bad, but words have meaning. It toes the line that anybody on any side can agree with. Ick, which toes almost no line, is a blank slate and you could read what you wanted to. The conservatives could look at it and go, this is a joke about woke. And progressives can look at it and go, this is a joke about Republicans.
Mena Suvari in Ick.VVS
There’s this narrow audience that you’re talking about, just which moviegoers you’re making films for. Is there a concern that you have to water yourself down? That you have to make movies for reasons that aren’t interesting to you?
Yeah, and it has been a big problem of mine for my entire career in filmmaking. I tend to mistime the audience. I don’t believe the politics of one era define the movie. For instance, my movie Detention, which had a much worse outing than Ick did, if you read Letterboxd today, that movie has a huge fanbase now and it lives on 12 years later. The youth audience is into it. They didn’t show up to Detention originally, because they weren’t born yet. It happened with Torque, too. People did not see the comedy in it, and thought I was just this music-video director making a commercial for Mountain Dew, when it was clearly a piss take of that stuff. The audience for Torque was 20 years later. You can mistime a movie, but movies don’t live in the year they’re released. They live forever.
I’m curious about sustainability, because Ick, it’s self-financed. You put a lot of your own money into this. Has it paid off?
I once had a meeting with Bob Weinstein, not Harvey, the other brother, and I was pitching a sequel on The Crow. We’re talking about Torque, the only film I had done by then, and it had bombed when it first came out. But the movie must have started eventually making a profit outside theatres because one day, I got a cheque for $80,000. I was like, what the hell is this? The movie must’ve made money. I tell this to Bob, and he looks at me and goes, “They all do eventually,” and smiled. We haven’t even released Ick yet, it’s just on [VOD]. The battle isn’t going to be one year, it’s going to be the next 20, 30 years. But if Bob is correct, they all do.
This interview has been condensed and edited.