Flying Lotus says his sci-fi horror-thriller Ash ‘was made for the gamers’

Director, DJ, and record producer Steven Ellison, better known by his creative sobriquet Flying Lotus, returns to theaters this weekend with his first feature film in more than eight years. Set on a distant planet, Ash stars Eiza González (3 Body Problem) as Riya, an astronaut who awakens from a coma to discover her crewmates have been brutally murdered, leaving her the sole survivor, save for the crew’s pilot, Brion (Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul). Plagued by nightmarish visions, Riya must choose whether she can trust Brion as she works to unravel the mysteries behind what happened to the crew and how she’s connected to this strange and seemingly hostile world.

Polygon had the opportunity to catch up with Flying Lotus — or “FlyLo,” as his fans affectionately call him — in the leadup to Ash’s premiere to talk about the next step in his career as a filmmaker, the art that inspired him to craft the film’s psychedelic and menacing visuals, and the most important lesson he took from the work of the late, great David Lynch.

This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.

Polygon: It’s been eight years since your first movie. How did you want to challenge yourself as an artist and a director in making Ash?

Flying Lotus: One thing I wanted to do is, I wanted to prove to myself — and I guess, y’know, the world — that I was capable of creating a film that was more mainstream. Something that is still accessible for audiences, and at the same time still brings some things you may expect from me. I love the medium so much, and I have a respect for commercial films as I do for independent films and avant garde. Y’know, I think there’s room for Jurassic Park and there’s room for Terrifiers. I think there’s room for all of it, and I love all of it, and I want to explore as much of it as I can.

When I got the script, it was just one of those things where I was like, I know what this needs — it needs a little bit of me. [laughs] That was the call to do it. I get a lot of scripts sent to me that are cool, but I just feel like, Well, what can I do?

Y’know, it’s a lot of scripts that are like, anyone who’s a competent filmmaker could put them together, they’ll be pretty solid films, [but they don’t] leave a lot of room for experimentation and trying to approach things. And with this material that we had, it was presented to me way more crazy than I ended up cutting it together. I think it’s a lot of fun to get a puzzle and jigsaw a thing together, but still make it so you can follow it and feel satisfied. Maybe you have some questions, but it’s still very satisfying in the end. And I think that’s a challenge in itself, but also hella fun.

I want to talk about your character in this film, Davis. It’s not uncommon for directors to play characters in their own movies, but it’s not every day you see those characters brutally killed on screen, aside from, like, Quentin Tarantino in Django Unchained. Without getting too macabre, what was it like filming your own death? Did you come up with different ideas of how you wanted to go out?

I did, and I just wanted it to be as brutal as possible, as fun as possible. I got rigged up to do the stunt; I didn’t get to do the stunt in the end, unfortunately, but I practiced getting thrown around and stuff. That to me is why I do this stuff, just those moments. I never, never intended on being in the movie. I really did not want to do it. It was, like, the last decision that was made before production. I stretched it to the last second, because I really, honestly wanted Eric André for the part.

Oh!

I know, right? It would have been so weird. [laughs] I really wanted him, but we just couldn’t make it work with the timing. It was just, like, too many days of nothing for it to make sense to get him. And so it just ended up me being in there, but I had a lot of fun doing it. And it was actually a really cool experience, because I got to bond with the cast on another level. Right out of the gate, like the first or second thing we filmed was my scene with the cast. I think it helped us to get to know each other. 

That stuff is real; just getting to know each other and getting familiar with them and empathize with their process. Because I’m in the scene with them, I’m feeling what they’re going through, and we’re all making sense of this, we’re all feeling good. It’s just a different thing.

I recommend any filmmaker — even if you don’t like acting, you don’t want to be in the camera — I do recommend you take an acting class or be in the mix to some degree, just so you can feel what the actors go through. I think it makes every director stronger. You don’t have to be in the whole movie. [laughs]

There’s a really cool fight scene in this film between Eiza [González] and The Raid: Redemption’s Iko Uwais. We first see it early on from a first-person perspective, and then later in third person. How did you go about blocking out and choreographing that scene?

I wish I could take credit for all that stuff. We had a great stunt team that put it together. You know, the one thing that I really wanted to stress early on was a first-person fight. I really wanted to get that. I’m gonna give away a thing here, but part of the reason why I chose to do it was because I knew that I could get away with doing some really crazy stuff without hurting my lead actress. I know stunties will throw themselves around and take it.

We had the best, the best stuntwoman for Eiza, and she was just super down to do the craziest stuff, just getting thrown around the room. Everybody’s like, “Oh my God, what happened?” And she’s like, “I’m cool, let’s do it again!” And it was just so awesome. It just made me go like, Dude, I want to do more action and more stunts next time. It was so much fun seeing it all put together.

[The stunt team] had everything blocked out for days, and then Iko shows up right before filming, and he gets the whole choreography in, like, five minutes. He’s got the whole thing worked out, adding new moves, and everybody’s like, This guy is the real deal. Who is this? There were so many people who didn’t know who he was on set, and then they’re seeing this man do his thing, and they’re like… OK! [laughs] And the stunt choreographers, they were geeking out to bring their best foot forward and whatnot. So it was tight. I want to do more of that stuff for sure.

In your first movie, Kuso, you credited yourself as “Steve.” With Ash, you’re credited as Flying Lotus. Is that distinction important to you as an artist? Do you see “Flying Lotus” as a project that exists within your body of work, or is it an all-encompassing umbrella that covers everything you create?

Yeah, at this point, I’m just kind of owning it, man. I’m just kind of owning it all the way through. They’re like, “You sure you don’t want to just be Steven Ellison?” and I’m like, “No, no. [laughs] Going all the way. Let’s go all the way,” because I’m proud to be able to do all these things. I don’t want to diminish any of it, or say that one is more important than the other or anything. It’s all important to me. So I take it all very seriously, and I put all my time and energy into these projects, so I don’t feel the need to separate them. And to be honest, I think even though this may be more of an accessible, more commercial film, the heads will know.

A lot of the dream sequences and gore effects reminded me of Panos Cosmatos’ Beyond the Black Rainbow and Mandy. Were there any films, directors, or specific art you looked to for inspiration while crafting the visuals for this film? 

I love Panos. He and I would talk a bunch, and I would just whine to him, basically. I’d just be like, “What is happening? Why is everything this way, why does the world suck?” and he’d be like, “I don’t know, I hate it!” [laughs] But a film I think we both have in common, that was actually a big piece on the mood board, was Suspiria. That was something he and I both pulled from visually. Me and the cinematographer would look at scenes from Suspiria and try to pull things that weren’t necessarily  commonplace for sci-fi, because we have the limitations of our budget.

So I was like, What were these filmmakers doing? The Italian filmmakers, avant-garde, experimental directors, y’know, cats like Panos. But a lot of video games — I have to say that the biggest inspiration I pulled reference-wise [was from] games like Silent Hill and Dead Space and Death Stranding and Resident Evil. Those are the big things that inspired me. I think this movie was made for the gamers. Like, as soon as I read the script, it kind of touched me in the PlayStation sticks. I just really felt it on that level.

I definitely saw and felt that in the spacesuit designs seen in the movie, with their bio-organic parts and bioluminescent spines and whatnot.

Yeah, for the biomechanics, there was actually a whole Earth sequence for the beginning that kind of explained a bit more, or just gave a little bit more insight as to the technology — where they come from on Earth, and the company they’re part of, and a greater sense of why they have that stuff. I really want to explore that in a comic, y’know? So hopefully, people like the movie, and then they’ll want something else. We’ll make a comic or something.

David Lynch passed away in January. I know you were a huge fan of his work, and even had the opportunity to collaborate with him. What did his work mean to you, as an artist, as a director, and as a filmgoer? What did you take from his work?

I just remember falling in love with his stuff right before I went to film school. I was super switched on, because I felt like there was someone who just embraced all the different mediums and embraced his, whatever his thing was, and the world embraced back. Which was really wild, to see that this person was celebrated for being just such an individual, and having a voice, and creating space for surrealists in film on a mainstream level.

I think that was just huge, y’know, creating things that were more so about how film feels, how a scene feels, versus what it means. That’s where that comes from [in my work]. Well, maybe not where it comes from — but I think we see it so often as a result of what David Lynch did, and I think that is the greatest lesson that I’ve learned from his work. Sometimes, it’s just about the feeling.

Ash opens in theaters on March 21.