Categories: Misc

Interviews // Scott Goldberg

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I Heart Noise: How did you end up writing, producing and directing The Forest Hills?

Scott Goldberg: The Forest Hills came from an idea that we had when we unfortunately had to back out of a project that was filming, that was going to film in Detroit. There’s unfortunately a lot of red flags from a producer I was speaking to with a production company that we wanted to hire and work with. We had to start anew, and we kind of just started a new script which then formed into The Forest Hills, completely different from what we had planned with the other production company. And this setting was basically a cabin in the middle of the woods. And it always had the idea of a character that was running through the woods after having murdered someone, in cold blood, and then basically going to the cabin to seek refuge in the cabin. There was always that initial story there.

I Heart Noise: What do you want people to take away from this film?

Scott Goldberg: It’s very interesting seeing a lot of the comments nowadays. How the film is done, you could see so many people’s perspectives and what they believe and what, as far as the characters and what happens in the story and how people feel about the film, from the most negative stuff to the most positive. So, it’s very interesting seeing what I feel people should take away and what actually, people do take away.

I’d say that the biggest takeaway that I think people should get out of this is that cruel world that we live in, where we need love and respect and communication, unfortunately, are people like Billy, who’s played by Edward Furlong, who take advantage of people because of their mental health. So as you see with Rico being taken advantage of and fooled by Billy and Arnie and a lot of the other people in the film who basically screw with him to basically laugh about it.

And I’m sure everyone has gone through something like that to an extent with believing that people are kind and good friends, and all of a sudden, it’s the complete opposite. Just taking away the fact that basically people are cruel. But at the end of the day, for many people, there still is at the end of the tunnel, because I know a lot of people do deal with mental health and struggle to a big degree, as we all do.

And no matter how big or how little, that struggle is, there is help if people need it. And unfortunately for the character Rico, he was unable to get it. And we just wanted to kind of showcase how important it is, reaching out to people and. And trying your best to, kind of communicate and. And have that communication and dialogue of communication open. That’s very important.

I Heart Noise: I was curious watching this. Has there ever been a time where you’ve struggled with knowing what’s reality the way Rico did in the film?

Scott Goldberg: Well, I grew up diagnosed with ADHD, struggling with everyone has a disability to a degree. I feel, whether it’s mental, whether it’s physical, and people adapt and utilizing whatever disability you have, such as myself, who has ADHD, in school it made it very difficult for me to concentrate on things that I just wasn’t interested in, but on things that were creative and things that I really felt I thrived in.

I think focusing on that and really realizing the type of things that I enjoy doing as far as a career or things like that really helps tremendously. So, speaking of Shelley Duvall, when we worked with her, her struggle wasn’t at all mental. It was physical. Cause she was dealing with physical ailments. So that’s why production worked alongside her with making sure she felt comfortable and just working with her to create a safe environment for her and where she felt respected and loved and cared for. And, yeah, so I think people just deal with a lot of different things, whether it be physical or mental.

I Heart Noise: I really appreciate that because like I said in my review, I’ve had psychosis and struggled with reality before. So, I felt like you really captured that, like, just not knowing what’s real, not knowing where the footing is.

Scott Goldberg: Well, yeah, I appreciate that. And, you know, the interesting thing upon reading reviews is like it’s so interesting to see as we take the good and the bad, right? Like negative reviews and positive reviews and whatnot, just seeing on certain websites like Letterboxd.

Cause, you know, people like me, we’re filmmakers. We’re human beings. We want to know how people think about the film and feel about the film and seeing like, the negativity and confusion sometimes with, like how a story is structured.

Conversations are good to have because It can help by telling the story because if something might be confusing in a film, for example, in reality, what it was for me with The Forest Hills, to keep it disjointed because it was being narrated by Rico and his disjointed personality and who he is and the mental state that he has is not going to be linear. It’s interesting. Some people got that, and some people didn’t.

So that was very interesting to see that. Some people do take that away from that. But then there’s some reviews where people are completely just bashing the film and it’s fine. Everyone’s going to have an opinion, and you have to respect that, and that’s completely fine. Everyone’s human and we all are affected to a degree, but at the same time, we create. Art is creative and you have to put it out there and whatever people think is what they’re going to think.

I Heart Noise: How did you end up casting Chiko Mendez as your lead?

Scott Goldberg: I’ve known Chiko Mendez for many years. He responded to a Craigslist ad that I had where I needed a mauled zombie victim for a thesis project. So, I went to what’s called a community college, Five Towns College in Dix Hills, New York. And so the teacher had said, hey ‘Your thesis is going to be about this. Your video production thesis is going to be about a superhero, and you need to come up with a story.’.

My idea was to have a story about a janitor, an everyday janitor who becomes a superhero by fighting zombies in the school with a security guard late at night. So having the casting call needing one for a mauled zombie victim, Chiko contacted me and said he was interested, and he came out and it had a gallon of blood, and he just put in his mouth and started spitting all over the place and scratching his arms up with his nails to show that he had been attacked.

And just noticing, never having worked with someone like that before who, who definitely put it all out there. And I think there’s a clip on YouTube. If you type in, ‘Chiko Mendez zombie mauled attack’ or something like that, and you’ll see it’s from like 18 years ago or so. I posted it, obviously, after we had filmed, a couple years after we filmed it. But it shows his range of emotion, which is very similar to Rico. So, kind of building a story around what I knew he could do. And having known him all those years and worked with him on short films and stuff I felt that this was his time to shine, I guess.

I Heart Noise: Oh, definitely. He was brilliant.

I Heart Noise: So how did you end up casting Shelley Duvall?

Scott Goldberg: So, Shelley Duvall has always been an interest of mine to work with. I mean, obviously, as everyone else forgot about her. And then the whole 2016 Doctor Phil episode had happened, and I turned to my girlfriend at the time and said to her, I said “I haven’t heard of Shelley Duvall in a long time.

I love her look. Like, she looks nothing like Shelley Duvall from the eighties. And at the time, and just in general, I don’t like working with talent who are like models to that extent. So, kind of like the Rob Zombie, that stuff, like people who look real and raw. I felt like she had a very unique look. Like I said, she looked nothing like Shelley Duvall from the eighties or nineties. So that was my initial reaction to the Doctor Phil episode obviously being very sad.

And unfortunately, seeing the state that she was in at the time, I was like,’ I just wish she could overcome that.’ So, time came when the production was going and I said, we’re kind of throwing around names, Edward Furlong had come along and Dee Wallace at the same time. And then I guess just the idea again, who would I really want to work with? And then Shelley Duvall, her name came into my mind, and I didn’t know how to contact her. How do you, how do you contact Shelley Duvall?

So, Sarah, who runs the ShelleyDuvallXO Instagram page, had posted a picture of her and Shelley Duvall. Oh, my God, she’s still around. And, you know, she hasn’t acted in a while. I contacted Sarah and obviously being very protective, as everyone should be about, Shelley and people looking to be in contact with her. She unfortunately, wouldn’t give me the contact information.

I think they were doing a documentary at the time on her which ended up not being finished to this point. Maybe it will in the future. I wanted to contact her somehow. I just didn’t know how. So. I went on a website and I typed in her boyfriend, her partner, Dan Gilroy’s name.

I knew she lived in Blanco, Texas, so the information was readily available. Once I was able to find his number, I contacted him and I said, ‘hey, I would like to work with Shelley Duvall. I’m definitely interested in doing so.’ Then from there, Dan had said to me, ‘Here’s her number.’ He gave me her number. I texted her.

She said, ‘I’m interested’. And then we kind of just started the process from there. It took a while and then just kind of had that conversation of, ‘hey, we want to get you out to New York. We’re filming,’ There is an understanding at that point that unfortunately, she was not able to travel because of her physical ailment, which was her foot. She was having a lot of trouble with her foot.

And although she was driving around and being able to kind of go from place to place and go to her favorite spots, like to pick up Mexican food or whatnot, her mobility was not great. So, we then kind of just had to figure out, well, okay, what about if we go to her? So, Scott Hansen, the producer, and Steve Wallenda, one of the other producers, drove from Georgia 16 hours down to Blanco, Texas. And she agreed to be a part of the film.

She filmed a sequence where they put a backdrop behind her on her property and, like, a black backdrop. And she recited some lines because originally, it’s supposed to be kind of like a Pamela Voorhees type of flashback. She said ‘This is cool, but I really would love to work with someone. Can I work with someone on the opposite side of me?’

So that’s where the whole Felissa Rose doctor sequence came in. And also, Rico talking to her as you see before the opening credits, yelling at her and, as she sits in a wheelchair and how she talks about how, don’t talk to me this way and whatnot. And then from there, it kind of built off from there, where we then added the breakfast scene, Rico helping her out of bed. And then after that, it was about five different shoots.

So, the fourth shoot, I think, was where she was painting the wolf on that, the painting as she was lying in bed. And then the last date that I filmed with her, because I filmed with her twice. We spent 48 hours with her. We got her food, we’re hanging out. You know, me, Crystal Wyndham, who’s one of the executive producers, Chiko Mendez and Alex Leyba, we all just spend time with her and basically just filmed with her and kind of hung out with her and stuff over a two-day period.

And those sequences were like the flashback. Rico was saying, ‘I can’t take this anymore, Mama. I’m tired of this and that’. And this is where he took the knife and stabbed his adopted father, played by Dan Gilroy, and all these different where she’s screaming in bed. ‘What did you do to me?’ It was spread out over quite a bit of months.

But the last time we saw her was September 2023. And we kept in touch on occasion. She would call me and ask how the weather is, and ask ‘when are you coming down?’ ‘We were planning on doing it in August of this year, but sadly she passed in July.

I Heart Noise: Yeah. That’s so precious that you got to spend that time with her.

Scott Goldberg: Yeah, she was really sweet. It’s interesting, people always ask ‘Weren’t you freaked out with filming with Shelley Duvall?’ Like, ‘You must have been so nervous!’ There are all these different things about asking all these things about Shelley. And I said, well, time had passed so far, so long.

As far as her involvement in The Shining, obviously she doesn’t look anything like she did, so it wasn’t too hard to kind of separate the idea that this was Shelley Duvall because of just how she looked. If she looked very similar to, like, let’s say, how she did in the eighties, and yes, it would definitely be a little less nonchalant about it.

But I guess because there was the difference of time passage. It just made it seem like, ‘oh, this is Shelley.’ Like Shelley of today. I wasn’t really reflecting back in the moment of being in the moment with her and hanging with her. Shelley from The Shining, so there was. Because I didn’t know her back then either. I wasn’t even born, but she was so sweet.

And the issues weren’t even mental at that point. When I met her was a lot of just physical ailments and once we were done filming with her, that’s when her health really started deteriorating where we felt that we had to keep everything private. She went on hospice, as Dan had informed me months before she passed.

You know, we knew that if any word got out about her being on hospice, TMZ, we’d be all over it and all the news sources. And we didn’t want that to happen because the whole thing for us with Shelley Duvall was to give her a platform to act again and have some dignity left instead of letting the Doctor Phil episode be that kind of a final stamp on who she was in her career. And so, we felt that it gave her the opportunity to act again, and she loved it. So that was really nice to notice that it gave her solace and that she enjoyed acting again.

I Heart Noise: There’s so much jarring imagery in this film, like brief flashes of horrific scenes. And I was wondering what it was like filming them. Was it really mundane or were you having, like, nightmares at home?

Scott Goldberg: They were fun. I mean, that’s what you want as, like, a person who loves horror is to kind of make those types of–film those types of things. I mean, those are always a blast because the flashbacks are meant to be something that raises attention.

I think having added that tension was good, too, because seeing it in the theater now and just seeing, knowing that it’s a wild ride throughout and seeing the theater is cool because you get this experience, people’s reactions. So that was really cool to kind of see that. As we pushed those sequences and get them out there and stuff, people start to feel more tension, for sure. So that’s cool.

I Heart Noise: What was your favorite memory from working on The Forest Hills?

Scott Goldberg: I would say definitely Shelley Duvall, because she was really sweet and so kind. But mainly, when I think back to the movie, I think about the farmhouse, have visuals of the farmhouse and just the exterior of it and the way that everyone just worked together and a family type of atmosphere.

Working with Edward Furlong was really cool because I love his movies: Brainscan, Detroit Rock City, Terminator 2. I grew up on having popcorn in the cinemas and drinking Coke and having candy, Twizzlers, and just watching that and relating to that character of John Connor, so all those things. But just having that family atmosphere and being a part of this production was something I’ll always remember for sure.

The Forest Hills is streaming on Amazon, Fandango, Vudu and is available on Youtube. Through the month of October, it will be screening in cinemas and theaters.