Kriv Stenders with Simon Pegg on the set of Kill Me Three Times
Well, I got offered a lot of dog movies after Red Dog,
and I didn't want to necessarily repeat myself. I've
always been a believer that you're only as good as
your last film and you can't really rest on your laurels.
It's very important to me that I reinvent myself with
every film I make. This was such a perfect chance to
go really diagonally opposite to what Red Dog was. I
loved the script and I loved the project, I loved the
people involved - all the actors were already attached,
so it was kind of like a perfect offer in a way. I'd been
working on a couple of projects which were
languishing in development hell, and when this came
across my table it was just the perfect sort of escape
clause.
I guess you could say that people like Tarantino,
the Coen brothers, they've almost created a new
genre where comedy and realistic violence are
intermingled, and you've done that well with Kill
Me Three Times. How did you go about getting
that balance right between the comedy and the
violence, and making that work?
A lot of it was firstly recognising from the very
beginning that the film was a comedy... When I read
it I loved, I called the producer Larry back up and
said: it could be that I just found this perversely
funny... and I thought the way the body count stacked
up at the end was pure opera. Larry completely
agreed, he said yes you're totally right, this is very
much a black comedy thriller. Once I knew I was on
the same page with the producers it was really a
matter of going OK, let's really go for it, let's really
push it where we can to heighten the comedy. Part of
that was about restaging some of the set pieces, and
adding more of that absurd gallows humour into it,
but primarily it was about casting, and casting the role
of the hitman.
My theory is that comic actors make great villains,
because they're playing against type and the
audience's expectations. I really felt strongly that we
couldn't cast a straight actor for the hitman, or we'd
just be making another generic thriller. My suggestion
was, look I think we've got to go for a really wellknown comic actor, who hasn't really played this role
before. The producers agreed, and eventually we