While others may speak about business or politics in the marble and leather chair décor of the Hilton lobby (downtown Austin), we spoke to Jonathan King about killer flesh-eating zombie sheep. That’s right, sheep! Jonathan’s first feature film, Black Sheep, made it’s US premiere at SXSW after touring a slew of international festivals. Coming to theaters on June 22nd, here’s a sample of what you can expect as Jonathan tells us the background behind the humor and gore of his first feature.

This was your first US screening right? How did it go?

It felt great. It was really good. Toronto midnight madness was amazing, and then I went to Spain and had a good screening there, then France a few weeks ago, it won the Audience Award and the Jury Prize at a festival called Gérardmer, then last night (at the Alamo Drafthouse, Austin) was great as well. It’s really fantastic seeing it with audiences that are pumped to come and have a good time. There were a couple of good screamers in the back [too]!

How did you get your start in filmmaking?

My first job was doing graphic design. I worked for a magazine, a music magazine in fact. I was kind of bored with that and I thought, “Where am I going to go with this? What I really want to do is be a filmmaker.” I had played in bands a lot when I was young, so I knew some people in the music industry. I made a video for a friend – which I paid for myself, and shot on super 8 – and then he got some money from the record company to make a real one. Then his record company said, “Do you want to make another one for somebody else?”

So I made a lot of videos. That was a really great way of trying stuff out and learning about filmmaking and exploring ideas… The really great thing about it was, you get a little bit of money, a modest but real budget, and you get to shoot something, cut it, put it out there, and then you get feedback. There’s nothing like getting a reaction to your work and seeing stuff out there. So I did a lot of that and I was writing the whole time. I started making TV commercials and a couple of shorts but [also] wrote a lot of feature scripts.

Where did the idea for Black Sheep come from? Did you have a bad sheep experience as a child?

[Laughs] No… My own sense of humor is putting things together that don’t belong together. It literally just popped in my head, a New Zealand horror film about sheep, and bang, as soon as you did that you got laughs. You smile when you hear it. I love those films like Dawn of the Dead or Evil Dead where those people get torn apart. That fun-side of grizzly violence, where you can laugh at the awfulness of it. So the idea of a sheep doing that was funny, and I could also see how it could be gross. They’ve got sharp hooves… they’re not like a bunny. There’s a kind of scary beadiness to them.

It’s the eyes, they’re creepy, but sheep are funny at the same time.

Exactly, sheep are funny; they make you smile. So putting all that together… There are scary places on a farm. I don’t come from a farming background, but I’ve been out to a farm, and there are rickety old buildings, and you’re up in the hills and the winds blowing through, and the awful pit was something someone told me about, a big pit full of rotting flesh… So straight away, there are places where cool stuff can happen.

Was it difficult to find funding for a film about killer sheep?

A good part of the film was financed by the New Zealand film commission. They paid for about 60% of the film, and though they were to some extent, on board quite early on, we knew because of the effects that we needed a slightly bigger amount of money then would readily be available. But then Icon, which is Mel Gibson’s company, came onboard – more than a year before we shot the film – and said, “Yeah, we’ll buy it for New Zealand, Australia and the UK.” Which was amazing, a great show of faith from them because they could see from what extent it could work. Then the last piece of the puzzle was a company called Daesung, who are a Korean energy company, but who invested in The Host and Oldboy. The chairman of Daesung likes movies and he wants to be involved in them.

Was the writing process difficult moving from videos to more narrative films?

No it wasn’t, because I always thought in terms of story… A lot of my music videos had narrative in them, and even my commercials were more creating a real world, and real characters, rather than fleshy visuals and stuff. There are music video makers who make terrible, terrible films. It’s like great images but they don’t know what to do with them after. I never saw myself as that kind of music video director.

The cinematography was beautiful. It’s great how the opening landscape shots draw you in, even though you know any minute there’s going to be killer sheep…

Yeah, by the time people come into the theater they’ve heard the idea, and they kind of know what it’s about, but if sheep were tearing people’s heads off two minutes in, you’d have nowhere to go to. So I wanted to set up a real world. I want you to believe in the world and I want you to believe in the characters and the story. They’re all larger than life characters, but I want you to be drawn in and on board with that. Then once you’ve set up that real world, then something very goofy starts happening and it gets goofier as it goes on.

There were times I was kind of anxious that I was a bit serious at the front, but I think it actually… it’s like a kind of pendulum that people have heard about the idea, and they’ve heard about how goofy it is, then they get in there, it doesn’t hurt to just ground them a little bit before it all goes mad.

Your crew has worked on some huge films, but this was also your cinematographer’s (Richard Bluck) first feature right?

Yeah, well he was 2nd unit DP for King Kong and a lot of Lord of the Rings. So this was the first film he shot himself, but obviously he had a huge amount of experience… All those big movies have been made there [in New Zealand], and the level of craftsmanship and experience is there to tap into. Yeah… I mean look, for a first-time filmmaker, and a reasonably low-budget film, that for me is a great thing about living in a place like New Zealand and in a town like Wellington. If I was in L.A., there’s no way I’d get near a crew that had that experience! So yeah, I’m very fortunate… and you should see it in the movie. I always wanted to make the A-version of my goofy B-movie.

The pit scene was really disgusting! Did that take a ton of time to shoot?

It did. We built that in a studio in fact. We had all that kinds of shit going in there! There are all these rubber bits, and there are some jawbones, and then the fake blood, and the slime. The guys from Weta turned up in the studio with these big buckets, one bucket’s marked “blood,” and the other bucket’s marked “slime,” and [they] just started glooping it in there. Then I was like, “I’m going to need something else,” so we sent somebody out to the shops to get packets of custard, and then we’re putting custard in there as well just for yellow slime… It was great fun! It was quite disgusting!

So then our actors had to jump in there, and we wanted to also set up the continuity of all the crap on them, because we were shooting the film out of sequence. In fact, we had to shoot them, with that crap on, before we shot them falling in there. So I was like, “Well how’s it going to look before all this?” So I did a couple of dry runs and then it was like, “Ok, we’re going to fill it up with all this shit, and you’re going to jump in there now,” and they’re like, “Oh okay.” [Makes a splat sound] It was amazing actually. I got quite hands on with the blood and the slime. [Laughs] It was great fun! Well, it was fun for me, I don’t know if it was fun for the actors lying in the scum!

You always hear people say, “Don’t use kids or animals in your films.” How did that work out for you?

The animal stuff was really hard. When you’re writing the zombie sheep splatter horror [film] … you write the very coolest thing you can, but then you’ve got to shoot it. So the temptation is to say, “Well what if the sheep just ran through frame?” Unfortunately I couldn’t just have the sheep just run through frame. There were moments when we’d get the sheep together and it was like, “The sheep aren’t going to do anything else!” Then it was like, “But the sheep have got to do more than that… this is a shot about them snapping angrily at people!” So I learned not to write a film with animals in it ever again. [Laughs]

Would you say that was the most challenging thing you had to deal with on set?

Yeah, it probably was, because that’s what the film is about, you couldn’t cut that stuff out. It had to be there, and then you were bringing people in on the promise of doing that, and yet it was really hard to achieve with live animals. We had great effects people, but that stuff is hard to achieve for effects. I learned a lot. I learned why effects are expensive and why they take time… An effect will look great for two and a half seconds, and it’ll look terrible for minutes and minutes and minutes, that’s the nature of it. So you’ve got to light it right, you’ve got to choose your moment, and a lot of things have to come together at the right time. Then you find the seconds that look good, add sound and then join it with the momentum of the story… but that stuff is a real challenge, so I learned a huge amount from that stuff.

What are your inspirations as a filmmaker?

People like Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson were very inspiring to me as guys who just went and did it. Nobody gave them permission or they didn’t wait for their break, they went and made things. And now those guys, as it happens, are some of the biggest filmmakers in the world. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I find that really inspiring. Then creatively over the years, I’m still inspired and flabbergasted by great movies, Orson Wells and Alfred Hitchcock, just incredible, incredible movies. And not in a kind of time-capsule way, I just think they’re so alive and fun. Then more recently, someone like Guillermo del Toro who makes incredible films, and also negotiates that studio world and really remarkable independent films. I find him incredibly inspiring. I really love The Devil’s Backbone, which was an earlier film of his.

What advice would you give to new filmmakers who want to do a SFX heavy film?

Don't! [Laughs] What I would definitely say is, make sure that everybody involved knows that how important that stuff is for the film you’re making, and it’s as important as the dramatic scene where the two lovers meet on the bridge and have their special moment. Make sure that everybody involved is as on board with knowing that the stretchy rubber head with the creature coming out of it… that has to work as importantly too. I think it’s kind of easy to treat drama seriously and then, “Oh you have twenty minutes to shoot the rubber head!” But the kids are probably paying the money to see the stretchy rubber head, not the love scene on the bridge. So make sure you’ve got time for that, and make sure your production is totally geared around to making that as big as a success as those other moments. You can’t spend a week shooting that stuff… you know, you can’t fuck around, but make sure you’re creating a culture where that stuff is given the same weight of importance, and everyone knows that it’s going to carry the same weight onscreen…