By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas.

I don’t particularly believe in the idea of working around a proven formula, so I tend to start where a horror movie would and end up in another direction almost subconsciously.”

—Mickey Reece

Even in the context of the often radically elastic parameters of independent filmmaking, Mickey Reece is a boundary pusher. Whether bringing his own playful spirit of experimentation to nunsploitation codes and conventions (Agnes, 2021), vampire traditions (Climate of the Hunter, 2019), or turning Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata (1978) inside out (Strike, Dear Mistress, and Cure His Heart, 2018), Reece is an artist whose enormous body of work is marked by an unwavering and unapologetic clarity of vision.

With his latest film Every Heavy Thing, Reece sets his sights on neo-noir, bringing his own distinct twist to the ’80s techno thriller. A charming and vulnerable Josh Fadem stars as Joe, a familiar everyman in a comfortable yet stagnant relationship with his long-time girlfriend Lux (Tipper Newton) who spends his days selling ad space for one of the country’s last remaining alt-weeklies. When Joe witnesses the murder of lounge singer Whitney Bluewill (Barbara Crampton) after a night out, he is inadvertently drawn into a weird, chilling web of high-tech shenanigans and good old fashioned serial murder, in which James Urbaniak’s tech barron William Shaffer plays an increasingly central role.

And yet the real magic of Every Heavy Thing – like all of Reece’s films – is less the story itself than the unrelentingly charming and idiosyncratic way he chooses to tell it. Much in the spirit of long-time Urbaniak collaborator Hal Hartley, Reece’s films too are electrified by a particularly captivating style of banter that straddles both sharp wit and something that at times verges on an almost goofy authenticity. Reece’s films generally are defined by a contagious spirit of play, which forbids his often sophisticated encounters with a whole range of genres and influences from collapsing into smug, cold intellectualism. This feels nowhere more profound than in Every Heavy Thing, a film that – while undeniably smart – never feels like it is speaking down to us. There is a sense of joy to Reece’s films and to his creative practice more broadly that always feels uniquely and distinctly his own.

Mickey kindly took the time to chat to us about Every Heavy Thing and its place in his fascinating broader filmography.

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Alexandra Heller-Nicholas: I had the joy of discovering you and your films when Strike, Dear Mistress, and Cure His Heart played Fantastic Fest in 2018, and it was like discovering gold – I don’t think I’ve ever had quite such a seismic sense of discovery before with a filmmaker who was already so well established. I believe you had at that point already made over 20 films: what was it like to find a whole new audience at that point in your career? Was that the film that changed things for you, or was it less precise and more a gradual process?

**Mickey Reece: **The number of folks that knew I was a filmmaker before Strike that I didn’t know personally were very few. We started screening these movies at a music venue in Norman, Oklahoma called Opolis. The first one was called Le Corndog Du Désespoir and it was shown to about 40 people in May 2008. We would hold these premieres about three times a year there until the venue, which had a capacity of about 150 (filled with chairs probably more like 80) became too small to seat everyone comfortably. I remember people had to stand at the back to see Time Machine in 2010. That would have been feature number 9 so by number 10 we’d moved to a much larger venue in Oklahoma City called City Arts Center (now Oklahoma Contemporary). We wouldn’t outgrow that place until Broadcast in 2016.

It wasn’t that there weren’t film festivals in Oklahoma we could show the movies at, it was just that we had built this community from the ground up and had the idea that we were getting more out of it this way, which is probably true in hindsight because no film festival would’ve accepted our poorly made movies, anyway. By 2017, we did a crowdfunding campaign for Mickey Reece’s Alien so it felt like we owed it to the donors to play it at a local festival and that’s when everything changed.

By the time Fantastic Fest rolled around the next year it came as a huge shock that people that didn’t know us would be into what we were doing, much less critics. The main thing it changed was there was now more of a focus on making something in the vein of Strike since the connections we made through that festival would be more on board in helping us with resources and financing if we were churning out a better version of what they saw in that movie.

Over the last few years I’ve noticed the descriptor “Soderbergh of the Sticks” is being used less frequently by critics when discussing your work, but as the Oklahoma-shot Every Heavy Thing demonstrates, you remain defiantly immovable from your roots. I’m fascinated to hear your thoughts about the relationship between place and your filmmaking practice – what is it about Oklahoma that is so crucial to your work?

I mean there’s no one really beating down my door trying to get me to film somewhere else. I live in Oklahoma City so naturally this is where most of my resources lie. We have one of the better tax rebate programs for film here so that’s enticing to investors, too. I do love Oklahoma but perhaps my relationship to this place is not as romantic as it would seem. It boils down to logistics for the most part.

Like Mark Duplass said: the cavalry isn’t coming, and the older I get the more stressful it is to make movies. I guess living and shooting in Oklahoma helps to relieve some of that.

Your films consistently reveal a fascinating and to my eye rather complex relationship to genre: you are clearly enormously comfortable approaching incredibly diverse genres (nunsploitation, horror, scifi, melodrama, just for starters), yet the scaffolding is always so distinctly “Reeceian”, for want of a better word. What is the function of genre for you – what does it help you do in terms of your broader creative vision?

I didn’t fall in love with cinema from just one kind of movie. There’s not a particular genre I gravitate toward liking more and I feel the same about making them. I think because I always put character first the material lends itself more to drama or comedy but then I never fight the urge to throw something other-worldly into the mix and that’s where the horror, sci-fi, fantasy elements come in. I don’t particularly believe in the idea of working around a proven formula either, so I tend to start where a horror movie would and end up in another direction almost subconsciously. I actually thought I had made a paint by numbers thriller with Every Heavy Thing until the reviews came out and said otherwise.

All that said, I think genre filmmaking is basically limitless but also provides enough structure to keep from going off the rails. There’s always going to be a humorous element to whatever I do so that much should just be expected at this point. I’m not really interested in jokes when I’m writing the script but if we’re on set and I sense a funny dynamic between the characters: 9 times out of 10 I’m going to lean into that, even if it’s detrimental to the tone. I can’t help it. I like to laugh.

Like Mark Duplass said: the cavalry isn’t coming, and the older I get the more stressful it is to make movies. I guess living and shooting in Oklahoma helps to relieve some of that….”

It’s a phrase I hesitate to lean too heavily on, but you are obviously very much an actor’s director, and that kind of intensive collaboration is clearly something that fuels you: it’s hard to imagine Every Heavy Thing without James Urbaniak, for example, and your affection for character-driven work seems implicitly tethered to your affection for working in an almost playful way with your actor collaborators….

Well, I started making movies because I wanted to act. I could’ve taken a class or gone to auditions but I didn’t want to work my way up from casino commercials and extra work, I wanted to be Brando. Unfortunately, after “Le Corndog Du Désespoir” I came to the realization that the other actors were better than me and they were even better when I was behind the camera giving direction. Possibly because of this I’ve always been willing to bend a scene for the actor.

If the dialogue doesn’t come out right, we’ll just change it all. If an actor makes a suggestion that’s gonna be a pain in my ass… we do it anyway. Maybe the craziest one is I once cast the wrong actor, watched them struggle through a scene and instead of replacing them I incorporated more scenes for them to shoot later so that their character was more developed by the time we got to the bad scene. My line of thinking was the audience would be more forgiving if they knew the character better. I’ve never recast anyone that I can recall.

During the shoot I’m usually sitting on the ground right next to the actors watching the monitor, cracking up. I think the playfulness and affection you’re describing is the actor trying to get a reaction out of me because, instead of being off in another room, I’m right there with them.

I struggle to think of few other filmmakers whose filmography demonstrates just how nimble indie cinema is in terms of what you can do on very little money. How has this question of budget and creative possibility changed in your work over the years, and what has remained the same?

At this point I’ve definitely worked with a big enough budget that I could’ve made a little indie hit by now but does anyone know what that would look like? What kind of movie could I make that audiences would latch onto? No idea. I didn’t really make movies that played well to the audience’s expectations when the budget was $300 and I don’t do it now when the budget is $300,000. Perhaps, the audience I’m making movies for is the one that doesn’t know what they want until they see it.

How can you even discern between good art and bad art when your basis is familiarity and adherence to a thematic structure that an audience and marketing team have already agreed upon before entering the theater? Big Budget, Low Budget, No Budget: I’m going to present an alternative every time.

Low budget indie cinema also often demands the wearing of multiple hats, and in your films it’s hard to really distinguish your authorial stamp as a director from your very distinct style as a writer – particularly in terms of how you construct dialogue and banter. How do you conceive these roles from your perspective: are they inextricably linked, or do they remain largely separate?

I feel like you can’t have one without the other but I guess the only way to tell is for someone to direct a script I write. I’ve directed other people’s words before (John Selvidge co-wrote Climate of the Hunter, Agnes and Country Gold) and ended up with a similar result so I think directing is the key. In my experience, people who aren’t familiar with my work as a director are pretty confused when reading the scripts, so I don’t know that the words really work on their own.

Every Heavy Thing** really helped me articulate something I really see across all of your films that I have seen, which is a really strong sense of film history as a kind of textural thing. It’s more than just referencing old movies in your work, its something more refined about capturing a kind of tone or vibe or sensibility that feels really part of the actual style and materiality of your film.**

I started making movies because I was inspired by other movies and the language I use when talking to the actors and the crew consists almost entirely of movie references. For Every Heavy Thing we were doing Brian De Palma. We didn’t go back and watch Blow Out or Dressed to Kill because we’re not making those movies, specifically. We just went off memory, incorporating elements that existed in De Palms’s movies when we thought of them. It’s a very casual process. In Strike Dear Mistress we were doing Bergman. In Country Gold we were doing Altman. We’re not going out of our way to emulate these styles, but they’re always in the back of our minds.

We are very much living in a time where the economic realities of our contemporary moment make it increasingly difficult for anyone who doesn’t come from family money to roll the dice and just make movies. But your filmography in many ways stands in absolute and quite joyful opposition to this conventional wisdom, in that you just went out there and did it anyway. What is your advice to folks wanting to make movies but feeling it is practically beyond them?

Edit! When I started working with crews I thought I was in for some big challenges but they made my job much easier and I was able to do the same for them by knowing what I needed without wasting any time shooting things I didn’t. If you’re comfortable in the editing room you’ll be even more comfortable directing.

But if you really wanna make movies you don’t ask for permission and you definitely don’t seek out anyone’s advice. You accept that your movie is probably gonna suck but you can always follow it up with a better one and then follow that one up with an even better one…and you keep going until you die.

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, a contributing editor to Film International, is a film critic from Melbourne, Australia, who frequently contributes to Fangoria and has published widely on cult, horror and exploitation film including *The Giallo Canvas: Art, Excess and Horror Cinema *(McFarland, 2021), Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study (McFarland, 2011) and the 2021 updated second edition of the same name, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (McFarland, 2015), the single-film focused monographs Suspiria (Auteur, 2016), Ms. 45 (Columbia University Press, 2017) and The Hitcher (Arrow Books, 2018), and two Bram Stoker Award nominated books, Masks in Horror Cinema: Eyes Without Faces (University of Wales Press, 2019) and 1000 Women in Horror (BearManor Media, 2020). She is also the co-editor, with Dean Brandum, of [ReFocus: The Films of Elaine May](refocus: The Films of Elaine May) (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), Wonderland (Thames & Hudson, 2018) on Alice in Wonderland in film, co-edited with Emma McRae, and Strickland: The Analogues of Peter Strickland (2020) and Cattet & Forzani: The Strange Films of Cattet & Forzani (2018), both co-edited with John Edmond and published by the Queensland Film Festival. Alexandra is on the advisory board of the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, and a member of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists. She has appeared in the documentaries Chain Reactions (Alexandre O. Philippe, 2024), on the impact of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and 1000 Women in Horror (Donna Davies, 2025), which she also wrote, based on her 2020 book.