Bryan Fuller made a career creating idiosyncratic series like “Pushing Daisies” and “Hannibal,” and has written for many more. Now he’s readying his feature film debut, which is set to debut at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.
“Dust Bunny,” which has its world premiere on Monday at TIFF as part of Midnight Madness, stars Sophie Sloan as Aurora, a young girl who is menaced by the giant, magical and bloodthirsty title beast who lives under her bed. She then hires a hitman (“Hannibal” star Mads Mikkelsen) to take care of the problem…if only he believes her.
Fuller says the story started as one of the possible episodes of the 2020 Apple TV+ series “Amazing Stories,” based on the Steven Spielberg-created anthology show from the ’80s.
“In some ways, it’s Spielberg, a homage to those traumatic childhood films of the ’80s, like ‘Poltergeist’ and, particularly, ‘Gremlins,’” Fuller says. “It was conceived and designed to be an ‘Amazing Story’ story. But as we were developing it for Apple, it was getting noted to death, and there were a lot of stories that we had developed that weren’t moving forward in the process at Apple. So I was like, ‘You know what, this would be a great movie.’”
Since Fuller has been a busy TV writer, creator and showrunner since he first wrote for “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” in 1997, he rarely thought about directing.
“I was usually consumed with a lot of rewriting, so there wasn’t much time to direct,” he says. “I’m professional and indulgent. If I were directing with so much writing responsibilities to do, and in terms of how much rewriting I do as a showrunner, it seemed I couldn’t do both. I couldn’t be 100% dedicated to the scripts, as well as taking a month off of showrunning duties to direct, so it never really was a reality for me. Initially, I had worked with a director that I was not a big fan of, and that director was assigned to me by the head of the studio and it was a bit of a disaster. I was like, ‘This could never happen again. I need to direct.’”
Fuller says that his favorite part of directing was bringing the film into reality alongside Sloan, his young star.
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“My favorite days were working with Sophie Sloan, who had as much experience with movies as I did — which was none,” he says. “With Sophie, we were finding it together and got to play in a way that you don’t usually get to do with an actor of a certain amount of experience. So the days with Sophie were play dates, being able to explore the performances, find the character, the cadence of the dialogue and in a way that was playful. It’s a movie that has a 10-year-old lead, so there was something about creating an environment that was going to be healthy and safe for a child and a positive experience that was a blast.”
Although film was a different medium for Fuller, he brought along the visual flair and love of color that often permeates his projects. He says that he had a unique shared language for discussing the colors of “Dust Bunny” with his cinematographer, Nicole Hirsch Whitaker.
“Our first conversations were in reference to my previous work,” Fuller says. “If ‘Pushing Daisies’ is very sweet and ‘Hannibal’ is very savory in terms of the color palette and lighting style, this has got to be mango chicken. It’s got to be savory and sweet and have a really dynamic flavor profile. So we talked a lot about flavors as opposed to colors.”
Ultimately, despite a few scary scenes, Fuller thinks “Dust Bunny” is the perfect gateway horror for families to watch together, as so many ’80s babies got hooked on the genre thanks to his beloved “Gremlins.”
Watch the “Dust Bunny” trailer below.
From Variety US