Interview with Ant Timpson for his Directorial Debut, ‘Come to Daddy’

Uber producer Ant Timpson has already gifted us with so many genre favorites like Turbo Kid, The Greasy Strangler, Deathgasm, The ABCs of Death, and The Field Guide to Evil. So when it was announced that he was going to direct his first feature, you can only imagine the excitement that ensued. Come to Daddy (read our review – HERE), starring Elijah Wood and in collaboration with Wood’s production company SpectreVision, is a thriller that reminds you why you still love Elijah Wood, and why Ant Timpson needs to direct more films. I was lucky enough to speak with Ant, and we discussed why he decided to direct, how his father’s corpse inspired the film, his unusual film collection, and of course, horror films.

PH: Hi Ant, how are you?

AT: Good morning! Tiffany, I am doing fantastic.

PH: Oh, awesome!

AT: Nice to meet you.

PH: You too! Come to Daddy, I loved it. Probably one of my favorites I’ve seen in the last year. So I’m super excited.

AT: Yay!

PH: So after years of producing films such as Deathgasm, The Greasy Strangler, Turbo Kid, and creating one of the best horror anthologies out there, The ABCs of Death, why did you decide to sit in the director’s chair?

AT: Well, first of all, thank you. And thanks for liking ABCs, a lot of people didn’t. I’m glad you did. I was a wannabe director way before I was producing anything. I was the kid that took his brother out and turned him into a zombie and killed all his friends every weekend. And then applied for grants, and made really pretentious short films. That was kind of my path, and then life has a way of throwing you curveballs, and I ended up basically sitting in every type of chair in the film industry from exhibition through the distribution, marketing to production. And it did just a kind of a full circle. And it took my dad dropping dead in front of me to shake me out of that cocoon and, for multiple reasons, realize I’ve got to get back to being that kid that wanted to make picture films. So that was it, that was the defining moment.

PH: You mention your dad… You gave a very interesting and special thanks to your dad in the credits of Come to Daddy, “To my dear Dad, whose death and embalmed corpse started this wild ride.” Can you give us a little back story on that?

AT: Yes. Dad was the inspiration of Come to Daddy, and I had a traumatic end with him where he literally, as we say, carked it in front of me. And so part of the grieving process, which his partner thought would be a great idea was for his embalmed corpse to come back and take some time in a coffin in the living room, and she was going to go away and leave all the children to… alone with their grief, with their dad. So that was the plan. What happened was I ended up spending most of the night in the house with my dad alone and ended up doing all those kind of thing that you do, that you’ve seen in bad TV movies and things where you go down and talk to you dad, your dead dad, and try to get these things off your chest. All I did was freak myself out. It was kind of a beautiful thing as well, and I was really super happy it happened. It was just something that really helped the grieving process in a lot of ways, and a big part of that was coming to the realization that life is really short, and I want to do something as a testament to my dad.

He was so supportive of everything I did in the film industry. I’m going to make this film, and kind of use this experience as the foundation for something. And then I had such a good relationship with Toby Harvard, the writer and I gave him all these themes, a skeleton structure of the film that I wanted to do. And he obviously had daddy issues as well, as many sons do, and the end result was this process. I don’t know how long we went back and forth but he wrote a pretty fast draft and came back and it just took off from there and fine-tuned it. For my first film, I wanted to keep it really tight and lo-fi. Originally it was going to be super lo-fi. I was just going to shoot it with friends and do it on 16mm and grunge it out. And then when the script kept expanding and becoming something super special I was like, well the ambition is way bigger, and I had to reach a bit further now. That’s kind of how I ended up going out to Elijah. Luckily he totally flipped for it.

PH: I’ve heard that you own one of the largest private collections of 35mm films.

AT: Yes, I do own a few.

PH: What are some of your favorite titles that you’ve picked up along the way?

AT: Oh, good Lord. I’m a huge fan of oddball exploitation. It wouldn’t be big titles that are well known to people. The ones that I treasure are kind of films that like Toys Are Not For Children, Manos: Hands of Fate, just very interesting curios from a period exploitation cinema with a focus on regional filmmaking. That’s kind of what it is. I love watching anything on film, to be honest. It either affects you or it doesn’t, really. I think it’s a generational thing that’s going to eventually go and slightly start to disappear, unfortunately, unless we have some sort of structure in place to keep it alive. But yeah. Sorry, I could talk about 35mm all day long.

PH: It’s the ones that nobody knows that make the best answers. That’s what makes it more interesting. That’s what makes collections fun. 

AT: Yeah, and also, they’re the ones that you have to save because eventually, they’ll be like all the films that were lost from the early part of the last century that have just been dumped because of saving space or reusing the materials involved in the making of them. There are some people out there doing good work with archiving but it’s the collectors that have really saved a lot of movies over the years, and they don’t get a lot of credit, sometimes. 

PH: What are you currently working on?

AT: I’m on board a couple of other films as a producer, an executive producer, that I’m super excited about. There’s one by Prano Bailey-Bond, a UK horror film called Censor, that’s in post-production now. She’s an amazing new voice coming out of the UK, and she’s made this film set in the world of a video nasty in the 80s about a female censor. I’m working on a really interesting documentary, and then Toby and I have big plans to get together and creative writing a new project that we want to get made, like all films, as soon as possible. We’re going out to market it very soon.

PH: That’s exciting! 

AT: I know! It’s bonkers. 

PH: One last question for you Ant and that is, what is your favorite scary movie?

AT: Oh, my God. You’re not going to do that to me, are you? I mean, Jesus. I’d have to break it down into decades. There’s so many different ways to break this down, Tiffany. There’s the scariest film I ever saw at the cinema. Then there’s the one that traumatized me as a kid, but probably wouldn’t now. There’s so many ways to go. I’m going to have a migraine trying to… and I don’t want to end up just going like, “Um, The Exorcist.” I don’t want to go that route. There’s something pure and primal… I’d have to go with Texas Chainsaw.

PH: Ah, that’s mine too! Great answer.

AT: We have great taste.

Thank you so much to Ant for taking the time to speak with us. Be sure to catch Come to Daddy during its theatrical run right now.