JOHN BERARDO Initiates a powerful slasher flick on social media safety.
JOHN BERARDO recently directs INITIATION, a film that turns your typical slasher genre on its head in a good way. It touches upon sexual harassment, and what it’s like to be a father of a young woman.
What school peer pressure is like for the golden boy, etc. The message is very strong, don’t mess with a protective father when it comes to his kid. I had the pleasure of having a phone interview with John, who cares deeply about such topics and made sure to transfer them onto the screen with care.
WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO MAKE THIS MOVIE? IT LEANS A LOT TOWARDS THINGS LIKE SCREAM, SORORITY ROW. MAYBE EVEN THE NEW BLACK CHRISTMAS?
JOHN: Yeah. I made uh. I went to a university for my graduate degree back in 2010. I made a short film for a class called “MAKING MEDIA FOR SOCIAL CHANGE“. And the point of the class was to make a movie that created a call to action on a particular issue that we cared about.
And my issue was online privacy. And so I used this as an opportunity to sort of create an homage to SCREAM as a short film with the opening scene and a guy on Facebook.
And the movie ended up doing really well. Like 90% of the test audience changed their Facebook profile settings after watching the early release. I knew that I had something with this movie. And so over time. I had it as a feature script in 2013. And then in 2013, I tried to get an interest in it. And I just couldn’t.
So the guy I went to school with, my business partner (Brian Frager), and the writer of the project came to write the script with me.
And over time we would have script readings and (Lindsay LaVanchy) was an actress that I went to UCLA with.
I was a directing major, and she was an acting major. And she would come to our readings and read characters for us.
“And over time she just added so much to these characters that we brought her in as a co-writer. So it happened in so many different stages of the process involved.”
But we knew that we wanted to make a movie that dealt with the dangers of social media. And we knew that we wanted to set it in a college environment with the slasher.
Because we were huge fans of DAVID FINCHER’S THE SOCIAL NETWORK. We thought of that movie as a prime example of a modern-day college film that really brought a seriousness to a real-world level of college movies that we really haven’t seen too much before.
We thought that. I grew up in Oklahoma home the UCLA, USC. If I knew anything, it was college.
And so, it just kind of evolved from there and became what it is.
WHO WROTE THE SCORE?
JOHN: (Alexander Arntzen) I’ve been working with him for–oh, God, thirteen years almost. Believe it or not, I was in college and was working at Apple. And I would teach classes, like the one-to-one classes. And he would come in on the weekend mornings with his dad.
He was still in high school, and he would learn how to build a website. In time I helped him build his website and he was graduating high school and going to Berkley School of Music. And he did that at the same time as I graduated from UCLA.
He just hit me up out of the blue one day and said “I would like to score the short film.” The one that I was telling him about while I was at work. And the rest is history. I’ve really not had to use one other composer for a project because I had to. But other than that, I use him for everything.
“He’s wonderful. I know he took a lot from Friday the 13th. The breathing. And a lot of the dark reverberation sounds you sort of hear, he actually took a drill and recorded it. And sort of warped the hell out of it. So it’s really cool.”
He’s a detailed guy, and that’s what I love about him.
THE TOPIC OF SEXUAL ASSAULT IS A BIG TOPIC THESE DAYS. HOW IMPORTANT WAS IT TO PORTRAY THIS CORRECTLY? AND HOW COMFORTABLE WAS THE ACTRESS PORTRAYING IT?
JOHN: “It was the most important thing for us. The most important thing.”
We were really making sure we did it the right way. And making sure that somebody that was a survivor would be able to watch this movie and see a realistic experience of what it was like to be one.
I think that so many of us–one of the things we really did, was I wanted to make sure we had a character that the audiences could identify with. Because we’ve all been a part of this conversation. The morning after, or after the party.
“Whether we have been a part of the incident or not, we have all been a part of this conversation.”
And so many people don’t know how to have this conversation.
Check out the trailer: https://youtu.be/fI0fttWFkiQ
Directed by John Berardo (The Labyrinth), he co-wrote the film with Brian Frager (A Persistent Illusion) and Lindsay LaVanchy (“Scream: The TV Series”). LaVanchy also co-stars in the INITIATION along with Jon Huertas (“This Is Us”), Isabella Gomez (“Head of the Class,” “One Day at a Time”), Froy Gutierrez (“Teen Wolf”), Gattlin Griffith (Green Lantern), Patrick Walker (“The Resident”), Bart Johnson (“High School Musical 3: Senior Year”), Shireen Lai, Kent Faulcon (Selma) with Yancy Butler (Kick-Ass 2) and Lochlyn Munro (“Riverdale”).
In INITIATION, during a university’s pledge week, the carefree partying turns deadly serious when a star athlete is found impaled in his dorm. The murder ignites a spree of sinister social-media messages, sweeping the students and police into a race against time to uncover the truth behind the school’s dark secrets…and the horrifying meaning of a recurring symbol: a single exclamation mark.