Kenneth Lui, best known for his VFX work, makes his first feature film debut with the crime mockumentary, Artists In Agony: Hitmen at the Coda Teahouse.
Kenneth’s previous work includes the visual effects for Doctor Strange, Captain America: Civil War, Batman V Superman, Ant-Man, and Guardians of the Galaxy.
Artists In Agony features recently discovered footage revealing how four famous hitmen died at the infamous Coda Teahouse Massacre. Ex-CIA Agent Jonathan Sully guides us through the footage, suspecting they were killed by the renowned assassin artist known as Rockstar, considered the greatest hitman who ever lived. According to Kenneth, Artists In Agony is an absurdly violent mockumentary that follows 4 foolish hitmen to their deaths and the hijinks of how it happened. It’s a satirical crime exposé with its tongue firmly in its cheek.”
Ensemble players include Melanee Nelson, Courtney Sara Bell, Paul Byrne, and Ken Breding.
Check out our interview with Kenneth:
I know you more from your VFX work, so I wanted to know what brought you to the entertainment industry in the first place?
Kenneth: I guess just growing up, you know, being a neglected child, I love escapism, so I loved the movies very much. I was always very, very much invested in what was happening on the screen. I was always literally on the edge of my seat. And even if I didn’t understand what was happening on screen, I was just very enthralled with the whole cinema experience. Then I went into film school, I went to Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, where I fostered my love of cinema and in that program, they teach you top to bottom how to do everything so I really cherished my time there. I graduated with a thesis film, a short film that won some festival awards called Falsehood, which was about– what I did was I put the Big Bad Wolf on trial for what he did to Little Red RIding Hood and it was like a film noir trial movie drama fantasy. So that made the rounds and while I was doing that, and just kind of doing the festival circuit, I was just making money as a teacher because I like teaching. I enjoy teaching very much. So at the time, I was teaching kindergarten and a buddy of mine who worked in VFX said, ‘Hey, you should get in on this VFX stuff because I think it’d be a great tool for you as a filmmaker to just have it.’ So while I was writing scripts, my buddy turned me onto VFX and he kind of trained me kind of like in Kill Bill, you know, like just whacking at the board, you know, by yourself at home kind of thing. I would go over to his house, you know, watch movies and eat pizza but then he also showed me some pointers on how to work with this program and that program and I would just go home with that same program and whack at the board, you know, just practice my circles, practice my strokes, practice my skills, and then when I felt kind of confident enough to kind of throw my hat into the professional realm, he vouched for me, and I was off to the races. When you do good work and you’re relatively pleasant to be around, that begets more work. I worked on a lot of shows for free and I got some professional experience that way. When you’re on one show, and they like you, then they’ll ask you to be on the next show, and the next show, and the next show, and so on. Pretty soon I was like, ‘Wow, what’s this? Oh, it’s a Marvel movie. Oh, great. Cool, cool. I kind of wish I didn’t see this take that kind of spoiled it…’ But hey, work is work and then I just kept learning and kept growing that way.
Yeah, I feel like those spoilers are the only downside to working in the industry.
Kenneth: I wouldn’t say the only downside, but it’s a big one because it’s like, oh it would have been nice to not know that. But that’s also a compliment, like, they gave you a really important moment to work on. So, you know, the professional side is just focused on making it look as pretty and as beautiful as possible because it is art, but, you know, the nerd inside of me is like, ‘aw man, it’d be nice to not know that reveal,’ or ‘it would have been nice to not know that!’
So, when you were going to film school and really getting into the industry, was directing a feature film your end goal?
Kenneth: Absolutely. Because growing up, you know, in the 80s, I was very much enamored with James Cameron and Ridley Scott, people who were just really good at creating universes, like I really just love to immerse myself in people’s visions. And when I found out that, like, there’s a job that actually lets you kind of help with design and kind of have a hand in with the acting and the shots and the pre-production and the conception and design, I was hooked. I was like, ‘wow, this is a job that lets you do all like? That’s fantastic.’ And it always was a dream of mine to direct a film and have an idea that gets so good to me that I can explore it and really kind of fill up a kind of universe where you can say that up is down, or that monsters exist. I was a very bored, neglected kid, (laughs) so, you know, I’m writing, I’m drawing, I’m singing songs to myself, I’m on a piano plinking out just random melodies and you know, I’m drawing characters through a story that I wrote myself and so I just got to indulge myself into my own little worlds. And so when I saw other people do it professionally and do it so exquisitely, like that’s just irresistible. I would love to someday be able to do something like that, you know, like what Ridley Scott does or what James Cameron or any of those guys, like, I relish the opportunity. So it is something that I’ve always kind of wanted to do and strived for, but also, out of respect, wanted to make sure that I, you know, knew how to do all the mechanisms and be on top of it. Like if you want to be the captain of the starship, you have to know how a starship works. So I never sneered at any particular discipline, I always was like, ‘okay, I gotta know sound, right? It’s my responsibility to know graphic design, or at least a little bit of it. Or at least know how to speak the vocabulary. That way I can communicate with actors. I gotta know acting,know writing…’ that kind of thing. So, yeah, I’ve always wanted the opportunity to do so.
So, now that you’re a feature film director, how does it feel?
Kenneth: Oh, it feels great. It does. It feels, you know, obviously it was a lot of hard work, but like, it just feels really good. As a director, you kind of have to be a little bit ahead of stuff and kind of have a vision and see stuff. And even then some people don’t even see it, including the people you’re working with, but then again, they don’t have the whole privilege of seeing the whole scheme. So when an idea gets good to me, I get very– I can get very possessed by an image or something or if I can just plant some kind of flag for myself, then I know I’m kind of screwed because I’ll do everything in my power to to try and make that image happen to make that piece of art happen. So, it feels great because I had an instinct that all the actors that were involved were going to do something great. And I set the bar really high. I didn’t make it an easy project because what I wanted to do was like an improv project, something I’ve always wanted to do, you know, kind of like a Spinal Tap kind of thing, but you have to have really good actors to pull something like that off. I’ve always wanted to do a project where I get to film it and kind of improvise the camerawork while the actors are improvising the scene with only me knowing the outcome. But if the actors improvise the scene where the outcome was better than what I had planned, that could work out too. It was a very free and very flowy kind of project. And that was exciting to me, because my previous projects were very designed, very meticulous and, you know, actors have to hit their marks and then hit this and hit that and this was completely different. This is jazz. That’s a saxophone actor, that’s a drummer actor, so to speak, and I got to kind of improvise too, and that was just irresistible. I’d tell one actor, ‘Okay, your motivation is to get the job,’ and I’d tell the other actor, ‘Okay, as the boss, your motivation is to not let them have the job no matter what,’ and just see what that looks like, let them collide. That idea of being a devious little manipulator was just irresistible. So it feels great. As the person with the vision, you a) like to see it come to fruition and b) be surprised. And that’s what I got. It was just a true family effort, it involved everyone we knew, because it was a very low budget, guerilla style, independent kind of thing. But it was an exciting idea. I mean, it took a long time, it took eight years, because we all have day jobs, and we’d do this in our spare time, but I never gave up on the idea. The actors were just delivering such wonderful performances. And then I had to get even more interesting, you know, and I would write the story as we went along. I mean, I had an end goal, don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I was completely lost in the woods. I had a map. I knew where we would get to, but the actors would bring such funny ideas and such wonderful performances, it just kept upping the ante. It was just exciting. I’m just proud that we finished it and it’s won some awards and now it’s going to be streaming. I just want the world to see what everyone did. Everyone brought their own dish to this potluck dinner that we made and I’m just so proud of everybody.
And you should be, it was incredible. I went into the film not really knowing what to expect and it completely blew my mind.
Kenneth: Yay! That’s awesome. I love it when movies kind of do a sneak attack like that on you. And I knew what we had given the equipment and the style of you know, the vibe of it all. I wanted it to kind of have this kind of zine in a paper bag kind of vibe to it. Kind of like a Clerks, kind of, because I knew we didn’t have a big budget but what we had I think a good amount of was ideas. So I figured good ideas, good performances, outrageous scenarios, and just anytime I could just make it upside down, I would do it. I would just throw marbles under the actors feet and just watch them figure it out. That was the fun of it. It was a wonderful experience to work with actors this way too, because I’m directing and shooting and being a character in the universe myself. I figured when am I ever gonna get the opportunity to do something like this? I got to indulge in a lot of the things that I’ve always wanted to try and just kind of did it and pretended like no one’s looking. No one’s gonna see this, right? So, we’ll just shoot it that way.
One of the things that I thought was particularly interesting was that there were so many title cards. I found myself having to rewind a little bit because I would be so engrossed in what was going on that I missed the title card. Why did you include so many?
Kenneth: It’s so funny because I was trying to have my cake and eat it too. As an artist, you get vain because you want the shots to be cinematic but the meilleur of what we’re doing was vérité, it’s supposed to be documentary. So I guess to answer your question, I enjoyed the contrapuntal nature of just– if I have you engrossed in the narrative then just to remind you that it’s a documentary. What I thought was funny to me, too, was you know, we’re kind of poking fun at documentaries themselves, like how kind of stilted they can be sometimes, you know, and how pointed, you know, they’re not true documentaries. They have an agenda a lot of times. I’m not saying all of them, but the whole piece was a wonderful kind of opportunity to poke fun at stuff and have its tongue firmly in its cheek about fandom, about violence, you know, violence in cinema, violence in America, guns in America. I just thought it’s such an absurd, silly, madcap universe that if I kind of could fool you into thinking it was or kind of lull you into a kind of trance with it, that’s part of the fun. It’s interesting how you can manipulate things with media, you know, so I was just, I guess to answer your question, just poking fun at documentaries, in a sense, like, I’ll show you something and then this card shows up like, ‘oh, yeah, that’s right, this is supposed to be kind of like a real thing.’ That’s the vibe I was going for.
What I wanted to do was something I hadn’t seen before. So I figured, okay, here’s a place where I can indulge it, and, you know, it’s very arty, but why not? Why not make it special, make it interesting, make it weird, make it, you know? So, I let it be cool and let it be weird and let it be its own thing.
How did you settle on the title Artists in Agony: Hitmen at the Coda Teahouse?
Kenneth: It’s two parts. So the Artists in Agony part actually came– Okay, here’s how the idea kind of came about. So a buddy of mine, he was heartbroken because he had gotten out of an eight-year relationship. Me and my wife went to console him at a park and he just kind of randomly said, ‘You know what, can I be in one of your projects where I’m just kind of running after bad guys and I’m shooting at them?’ And for some reason, when he said those words, the image of my friend shooting at bad guys– I just saw it as a very handheld kind of vérité style. And then it made me realize like, oh, that dovetails into my always wanting to do an improv kind of Spinal Tap kind of thing. And so then, once the idea got good to me, I tried an experiment. I had garnered a few actor friends that I knew were really good from doing all my short films. And I asked them to do an experiment for me. They foolishly agreed, and I said, ‘Look, I’m just going to try something. It’s just an experiment. It’s not anything. It’s not a short. I’m just going to shoot an interview with you, okay, and I want you to talk about your acting process. But I don’t want you to mention acting at all. So just kind of talk vaguely, but I want you to talk about your approach, how much prep you do, how method you are about it, et cetera.’ And what I was going to do was, I was going to take that interview, and then cut it to make it seem like they’re talking about killing people, like being a hired hitman. And first I tried it with them not knowing that and then I tried it with them knowing that. So once I told them the gag, I told them, ‘now pretend that you’re an assassin. And you know how blase and how casually you’re talking about your acting process? I want you to do the same thing but, you know, killing people for money.’ Once I cut together a few of those, I showed it to the actors and I said, ‘Listen, I think this is really interesting. I think this is really fun. It’s sardonic. It’s satirical. It’s weird, but I think it’s funny. Maybe I’m twisted like that, but I think it’s funny. So would you guys commit to like, maybe doing…’ at the time I said, ‘five of these kinds of scenes where we improvise stuff where you pretend that you’re assassins, and then I can maybe do an arc.’
Now, in one of the interviews, Frosty, the actor that plays Frosty, Jason. When I was doing his interview– the way they spoke in their interviews also gave me the angle I wanted to approach with their stories– So Jason randomly said [about acting], ‘you know, I just don’t want to be another artist in agony, you know, I want to succeed or–’ something to that effect. I don’t want to be another artist in agony. And for some reason, the alliteration and the way he said it, it just sparked something in me. It’s like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna call all these hitmen who fancy themselves, “artists,” you know, they’re that kind of fool of themselves. And so I started creating this universe. And it’s because of that random thing that Jason said in his audition interview. He just said the words “artists in agony,” and I just liked it, it’s catchy. There’s something about that.
As far as Hitmen at the Coda Teahouse, I definitely, again, was kind of taking my cues from other documentaries that I saw, where they kind of reflect on a tragedy or they talk about, you know, there’s always a kind of like a name for it, you know, the furious child or whatever. And then you’re like, ‘what’s that about?’ And then they give you that little subtitle at the bottom, you know, ‘what happened that the da, da, da…,’ or ‘the massacre at that one place,’ so I was just kind of taking my cues from that and I figured, okay, well, theHitmen at the Coda Teahouse just sounded catchy. It just sounded cool to me. So that’s when I put it together. A really, really long, long title.
Before I let you go, is there anything else you wanted to add about Artists in Agony?
Kenneth: Oh, goodness. Well, it was a labor of love done over eight years. It involved every friend and every family member and every friend I didn’t have yet. It was amazing. It was an amazing journey to have such a project go on. I was shooting a webisode for a friend of mine and I just happened to– that’s how I met Craig (Harrison) and I just said, ‘Man, I love your accent. I love your vibe. I love everything about you, Craig, you’re just, you’re so cool. Would you be down to play an assassin?’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, sure.’ And he was just so good! That’s why I ended up killing him so many times and he comes back to life so many times because he was just so wonderful to work with. So that’s one of the attractions of the project is its malleability. So what I want people to know is that it was shot over eight years out of love, it involved everybody and all hands were on deck and I’m just so proud of everybody.
So yeah, catch it and July 21 streaming on Amazon and you can see some extra stuff on artisinagony.com A lot of stuff we shot that didn’t make the show are actually living on that website. It was just a privilege and a pleasure. I’m just very, very happy and proud of everybody and I’m glad it’s finally finished and that the world can kind of see everyone’s awesome work.
Where you can follow Kenneth: Instagram | Facebook |
